I had the pleasure of traveling to Nantes for the study days Faire•Dire : écritures alternatives de la recherche – Dire 2025 : Quel(s) acte(s) pour la parole de la recherche ?, where I presented, on November 18, a conference entitled “Photographier la recherche : enquête sensible sur les gestes du savoir.” This presentation was part of an ongoing photographic research-creation project that I have been developing for several years. The project focused on academic researchers, not in their positions of authority or expertise, but in their everyday experience—moments of doubt, solitude, enthusiasm, blockage, or fleeting clarity. By paying attention to gestures, work environments, and bodies in reflection or in pause, this work offered a sensitive immersion into the making of knowledge, far from the mythologies of excellence, the imperatives of expertise, or institutional narratives. Within this framework, I shared both personal experiences and collective ones, such as the work of the duo Tour de Rôle.
Header image of the article: Jessica Ragazzini, Untitled, 2017.
Reference of the presentation:
Jessica Ragazzini, « Photographier la recherche : enquête sensible sur les gestes du savoir », paper presented at the study days Faire•Dire : écritures alternatives de la recherche – Dire 2025 : Quel(s) acte(s) pour la parole de la recherche ?, organized by ENSA Nantes, Nantes, November 18, 2025.
Abstract of the conference: : « Photographier la recherche : enquête sensible sur les gestes du savoir »
The creative process itself becomes a method of inquiry, in which photography is conceived as a device that allows me to question both what it means to do research and how such practices take shape within the folds of the intimate and the collective. This work is grounded in an epistemology of sensibility, where the image is not a mere illustrative restitution, but an exploratory medium in its own right—one that makes visible the multiple, complex, and nuanced aspects of researchers’ lives in France, Canada, Tunisia, and Ireland, countries I have inhabited as a researcher myself.
Through a relational and ethical approach to photography, I explore the affective ambivalences of research: feelings of imposture, pressures of productivity, but also pride, creativity, and intellectual exchange. Methodologically, this proposal aligns with a thinking-in-action, where the doing and the saying embedded in creative processes themselves (photographic shooting, staging, sensitive interviews) orient theoretical reflection. In this sense, the project resonates with the research-creation perspectives of scholars such as Grazia Giacco, positioning itself within a framework of knowledge production that transcends the dichotomy between theory and practice. Ultimately, it seeks to consider the image as a potential response to the very challenges of studying the academic field itself—an inquiry placed in mise en abyme beyond traditional scholarly formats.
An Intimate and Feminist Research-Creation
As a photographer and researcher, I work from my own body, my own experience of the academic world, and my own gaze. I carry within me the fatigue, resilience, joy, and precarity of the very environment that sustains me—both financially and existentially. My gaze is engaged, aware of its own position. In this sense, research-creation allows me to think the university from within—inside and with it.
Women in academia often maintain an ambivalent relationship to visibility: too visible, or never visible enough. Their bodies—long regarded as intruders in spaces of knowledge—continue to negotiate their right to exist there without justification, without the academic system dictating the terms of their biological and embodied condition.