Abstract
This article articulates a new methodology, named ‘shimmer’. Shimmer is an embodied, intuitive, temporally irregular, and affectively attuned methodology for creative-practice research. Grounded in feminist philosophy, phenomenology, autotheory, and Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, shimmer names the state in which corporeal knowing precedes cognition and generates theoretical insight. Drawing from lived episodes of illness, performance, lineage-work, and practice-led research, I argue that shimmer functions as an onto-epistemological mode of inquiry: a somatic process that moves between the imaginary, symbolic, and real to produce conceptual clarity with velocity. Against the masculinised tempo of academic grind, shimmer proposes a cyclical feminist temporality of emergence, saturation, and recovery. I offer an accessible framework for postgraduate students—especially those in creative industries—seeking to understand how intuition, sensation, flow states, and affect can become legitimate and rigorous components of scholarly method. While shimmer names an epistemological state of embodied attunement, its significance here is methodological: it functions as a generative condition for the production of knowledge.
Recommended Citation
Montgomery, Lola
(2026)
"Velocity: The Shimmer as Methodology,"
Imaginings: creative practice and inquiry: Vol. 2:
Iss.
1, Article 6.
Available at:
https://creo.sae.edu.au/imaginings/vol2/iss1/6