From ‘The pump’ to ‘Senescence’: Two musical acts of more-than-representational ‘acting into’ and ‘building new’ life

This chapter describes collaboration between a health geographer and musician, which involved making pop music in academic contexts. The challenges that emerged fall broadly under two themes. First, there was the challenge of doing non-representational theory itself. Of overcoming the academic urge to ‘dig down’ and theorize phenomena, and instead engage with public life more lightly and directly. Also of not employing ‘safe’ tried and tested qualitative methodological data collection approaches, but instead producing something new: sounds that proactively ‘act into’, ‘change’ and ‘boost’ the world a little. Second, there was the challenge of working with very different types of professionals and their mediums (a researcher with an artist and their sounds, and an artist with an academic and their academic words). Indeed, fitting music into scholarship and scholarship into music was not problem-free, and similarly understanding one another and one another’s motivations and approaches was an issue. Such collaboration can be tricky due to conflict with personal and professional conventions, but the result was, for us, rewarding, bold and impactful. The chapter provides a snapshot of future research if non-representational theory were to establish itself further in health geography in the way that it has in the parent discipline; a future where praxis is fundamental because it involves the creation of new realities.