The Art of Indifference, or Writing a PhD Thesis Otherwise

This article is a condensed version of my PhD thesis, or perhaps it is not; perhaps it is something entirely new. By articulating the insights and creative practices shaping my PhD research as an immigrant schoolteacher, I treat the thesis itself as an object of study, examining how the art (and act) of indifference enables me to write otherwise. Through meta-narrative and the hybrid use of theory and philosophy, indifference opens a psychic and transformative space for creativity, disrupting the insider-outsider binary and allowing multiple identities to emerge and co-exist. This meta-ethical turn to indifference is at once aesthetic, epistemic, analytical, and methodological. Moving beyond conventional research norms, I foreground inner subjectivity and mobilise psychoanalysis as a mode of critical meta-reflexivity. Qualitative research writing, in this sense, becomes a form of experimentation in relational knowing, understood as an ongoing interplay of affecting and being affected that attends to moments of intensity and movement across time and space. By turning my thesis into an object of retrospective inquiry, I trace three forms of creative praxis through which an indifferent mode of research writing can emerge. Conceptualised as creative methodologies, these praxes render analytical processes visible, allowing personal ethics, tensions, and differences to shape the research. While reflecting on the possibilities and dilemmas of this experiment, and on the contradiction of practising the art of indifference within a research culture that values citation and recognition, I invite readers to consider its relevance to their own research practices. In doing so, this work may contribute to the personal, paradigmatic, and philosophical dimensions of qualitative inquiry and advance the methodological and conceptual development of creative scholarship.