Open Call for Provocations: What remains opaque in how you study the world?
Teoma Naccarato
EXTENDED DEADLINE: MONDAY 1st of JUNE 2026
OPEN TO EVERYONE! SUBMIT A PROVOCATION @
https://www.provocations.online/practices-of-study
This is an open call for provocations as part of the long-running Provocations Project, launched in collaboration with the Centre for Pedagogy Futures at Falmouth University.
We invite responses to the question: What remains opaque in how you study the world? Here, “study” is not limited to formal education or academic research, but includes the many ways we attend to, engage with, and make sense of the world through practice, experience, and everyday life.
Provocations are concise, evocative contributions—texts, images, sounds, videos, or hybrid forms—that open toward unanswerable questions. They may be speculative, poetic, critical––and themselves opaque. All submissions will be published online and will contribute to a wider series of conversations, including curated conversations at Falmouth University and online with international contributors.
We welcome responses from across disciplines, practices, and contexts—including those working within and beyond the arts, humanities, sciences, education, and technology. Everyone is welcome to submit. You can submit in any language. If an aspect of this call or submission process presents a barrier, please get in touch—we are happy to support alternative formats and ways of contributing.
The extended abstract below outlines key themes. It is intended as a starting point, from which you are free to depart. We aim to gather a broad cross-section of perspectives to surface resonances and generative tensions across practices of study.
Extended Abstract: PRACTICES OF STUDY
We want to know: What remains opaque in how you study the world?
Study is often framed as acquisition: knowledge gained, skills developed, outcomes achieved. But study can also be something slower, less defined—a way of attending, repeating, noticing, and staying with what does not immediately resolve. It may unfold through reading and writing, but also through movement, listening, making, and being with others. It may be structured, or it may emerge in fragments, rhythms, and interruptions. In this sense, study is not only a means to an end, but a practice in its own right: one that unfolds over time, resists immediate capture, and is shaped by the conditions in which it takes place.
At the same time, study does not occur on neutral ground. It is shaped by institutions, infrastructures, and expectations that determine what counts as knowledge, who is recognised as a knower, and how learning is valued or measured. These conditions organise access to time, space, and resources, while also shaping the forms of attention, discipline, and relation that study requires. They can enable sustained inquiry and collective engagement, but they can also compress study into productivity, performance, and transaction.
To ask what remains opaque in how you study the world is to attend to the limits of what can be known, articulated, or accounted for within these conditions. What escapes recognition within your practice? What remains tacit, embodied, or difficult to name? How do repetition, discipline, habit, rhythm, ritual, or automation shape what comes into focus—and what recedes?
Opacity here is not simply an obstacle to overcome, but a condition that shapes study itself. It marks the partiality of attention, the limits of perception, and the uneven ways in which knowledge is formed and shared. What cannot be fully known may still be sensed, repeated, or carried. It may generate new forms of inquiry, relation, and practice, even as it resists being made explicit.
This provocation invites contributions that explore study not only as intentional learning or research, but as an ongoing practice shaped by what remains partially unknown. What does your work make visible? What does it leave in the background? And how might attending to what remains opaque open onto other ways of sensing, knowing, and relating in the world?
Rhythm and study: Study unfolds in time, and often through repetition. It takes shape in rhythms of return: reading again, rehearsing, revisiting, lingering. These rhythms may be steady or uneven, disciplined or improvised, shaped by institutional schedules or by the demands of a practice. They can sustain attention, but also produce fatigue or habituation. To study is to enter into these temporal patterns—whether through daily routines, iterative processes, or moments of interruption—and to be shaped by them in turn.
Place and study: Study does not happen in the abstract; it is always situated. It takes place in classrooms and studios, but also in kitchens, streets, online spaces, and shared environments. Each setting affords different modes of attention, different forms of relation, and different possibilities for learning. Place shapes what can be noticed, who can participate, and how knowledge is exchanged. It also carries histories—of access, exclusion, and belonging—that continue to inform how study unfolds.
Discipline and study: Study is shaped by discipline in more than one sense. It is structured by fields of knowledge—what counts, what is valued, what is taught—but also by practices of training, repetition, and constraint. Discipline can enable focus and depth, but it can also narrow what is thinkable or sayable. At the same time, study often exceeds disciplinary boundaries, moving across methods, forms, and contexts. It may follow its own lines of inquiry, drawing connections that are not easily contained within established frameworks.
Boundaries and study: Study is always bounded, but these boundaries are neither fixed nor neutral. They shape what is included as knowledge and what is left out, what is visible and what remains tacit or unspoken. Boundaries may be drawn by institutions, by methods, by language, or by the limits of perception itself. They can be reinforced through habit and repetition, but they can also be shifted—through encounter, translation, or sustained attention to what resists easy understanding.
Bodies and study: Study is not only a cognitive activity; it is also embodied. It takes place through posture, breath, gesture, fatigue, and sensation—through the ways bodies attend, endure, and adapt over time. What is learned is shaped by how it is felt, repeated, and carried. Bodies also register limits: of energy, access, mobility, and care. These conditions influence how study unfolds, who can participate, and what forms of knowledge are sustained or overlooked.
Technologies and study: Study is always mediated by technologies, from books and instruments to digital platforms and computational systems. These tools extend perception, organise information, and shape how knowledge is produced and shared. They can enable new forms of inquiry and connection, but also introduce constraints, dependencies, and biases. Technologies structure the conditions of study—what is accessible, what is visible, and how attention is directed—while also becoming part of the practice itself.
—Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum and Shaquira Lue