Pool, S. (2022) Residency-as-Method: A Process-Based Approach to Developing Artistic Ways of Knowing Within Sites of Informal Learning. PhD thesis. Manchester Metropolitan University, Education and Social Research Institute.

Steven Pool’s thesis advances a deceptively simple proposition: residency is not merely a condition surrounding research but can itself become a method. By defining residency as practice operating within a site, Pool shifts attention from the production of a discrete outcome to the relations generated among practitioner, place, community and ongoing inquiry. His theoretical contribution lies in treating research-creation as a thinking-making-doing continuum rather than a sequence in which practice is subsequently translated into academic explanation. Assemblage and nomadic thought support this move, but the thesis remains committed to the contingencies of situated work, contradiction and partial knowledge. Methodologically, Pool works across multiple sites and follows how concepts emerge through encounters rather than imposing a stable protocol in advance. The wider significance is substantial for artistic research and informal learning: a residency becomes a temporal-spatial apparatus in which agency, knowledge and practice are co-produced through sustained presence rather than delivered as predetermined results.