Posted by Mira Benjamin and Scott McLaughlin on 2025-12-07
Guest editors Mira Benjamin and Scott McLaughlin invite contributions to a special issue of video articles 'On Music', which asks what an evolving discourse around embodied research and videographic scholarship can offer to music as a field; and what music can offer to embodied research.
Journal of Embodied Research is a peer reviewed, open access, academic journal with a focus on the dissemination of embodied knowledge through video. JER publishes exclusively video articles, hence all contributors to this issue must be in the form of video. For more information about the journal, visit: <https://jer.openlibhums.org/>.
Our open call for this issue invites contributions from practice researchers in music and sound for whom embodiment forms a significant methodology in their research process, for example:
● where the insights of the research process are themselves embodied—e.g., new techniques, relational methods, training paradigms, etc.
● where embodied work serves as a substantial organising principle in a research process, leading to various modes of insight—e.g., new compositional or technological approaches, frameworks of access & inclusivity, etc.
Embodiment is an umbrella term that acknowledges the various ways of knowing that are inherent—lived, experienced, enacted, practiced—in human bodies. Embodied work is positioned at the intersection of creative and critical methodologies, emerging from the practice turn (Schatzki et al., 2001), building on foundational work in Music Performance Studies (Rink, 2004; Cook, 2013), and aligning with post-textual (Small, 1998) and practice research (Bulley & Şahin, 2021) discourses in music and sound. Embodied research (Spatz, 2017) thus proposes a wide range of activities—from performance and sonic arts to listening and 'cyborg’ musicking (Dyer & Kanga, 2023)—as spaces of being-doing-knowing (Nelson, 2022).
Embodiment and embodied practice have become thematic hot-spots in recent musical discourse, affording researchers the means to recognise and articulate technical, sensory, affective, perceptual and tacit knowledge forms as investigative territories. Where music researchers identify their work as ‘embodied’ they may be contributing to a number of distinct fields, for example:
● Epistemic frameworks in which embodied work is explored through practice research methods, with primary research audiences of practitioner-researcher peers exploring embodied activity as a form of knowledge, and the transmission of this knowledge within and between disciplines.
● Cognitive frameworks in which embodied work is explored through neuro- and social-scientific methods, with primary research audiences of music psychologists, creative health practitioners, and creative arts researchers engaging with 4E/5E frameworks.
● Experiential frameworks in which embodied work is explored through phenomenological/experiential reflective methods, with primary research audiences of creative practitioners engaging with questions of communication, interpretation, expression, and practice culture autoethnography.
● Biophysical frameworks in which embodied work is explored through laboratory methods (e.g. gesture capture tools), with primary research audiences of health researchers, and creative technologists exploring data generation and quantitative mapping of bodies in practice.
Our aim for this JER issue is to present a broad range of research from music and sound practitioners, making space for the ‘methodological pluralism’ (Borgdorff, 2012) that is often seen as a key strength in practice research work. We recognise Embodied Research as a relatively new methodology within the academic discipline of music, and note that musicians still often articulate their insights by drawing substantially on conceptual frameworks external to music—e.g. from theatre, dance and physical performance, social epistemology, and philosophy of science. We hope this issue will highlight some of the novel embodied methods at work in musical practices, and begin to establish the keystones that are distinct to embodied research in music.
Call for Abstracts
We invite written abstracts (maximum 300 words) accompanied by examples of edited/annotated video (~3 minutes). The abstract should provide an overview of the research topic/questions, and the practice involved, while the video material provides a preview of the style and approach that the final video article would take. Please see existing JER video articles for examples of the very broad range of possibilities for style and format, and we strongly suggest reading the JER style guide before planning your abstract. The style guide begins:
Authors should not feel bound to existing conventions of the video/film essay, documentary filmmaking, visual anthropology, or other genres of videographic production. Instead, you should design the videographic form of your article as an articulation of its research content.
This means that different research methodologies will generate different forms and styles of video article. We are not looking for a single standardized form of video article, but for a deep engagement with the relationships between textuality, audiovisuality, and embodiment.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by Monday 23 March 2026. For those selected, full video articles — for peer review — will be expected by 7th September 2026.
