Research Projects

I conduct research within the disciplines of Creative Writing and Literary Studies.

My creative practice research explores creative nonfiction, life writing and creative-critical arts practice.

These are the four key areas of my current work:

Creative nonfiction and life writing, including forms of creative-critical writing, auto/biography, literary and creative journalism
Applied philosophy and literary theory in writing, with focus on creativity in writing/language, writing difference and creativity, philosophy in literature and poetics
Community writing: writing diaspora and memory, collective biography
Teaching and research pedagogy: creative practice research, research writing, pedagogical approaches to writing education

Image and caption from Water Like Ink (2023)

In 2024 I am working on two major research projects (Recovering and Water Like Ink),

alongside various research articles (as listed below):

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RECOVERING

(Anthology and online scrapbook)

My 2020 PhD found that acts of expression in self-writing can counter the containment of anorexia. I found that the gerund - the ing - of recovering was important: we recover ourselves continually, in living and in connecting with each other. My aim now is to put these finding into practice.

The seed of this project is back in 2006, when I, as a teenage anorectic, sat in a hospital waiting room amid glossy magazines detailing celebrity diets and faux-horror at their skeletal bodies. In my diary I'd written that all I wanted was a story from someone who'd stepped into recovery, decided to eat, and was okay. Recovering will gather stories of hope, print and bind them, and drop them into hospital waiting rooms around the country. The online scrapbook will offer a space for members of the public to contribute their notes and messages of recovering.

WATER LIKE INK
(Collaborative community life writing)

A collaborative life writing project, with Aegean Macedonian diaspora in the City of Whittlesea, Melbourne.

In the two decades from 1960, tens of thousands of Macedonians migrated to Melbourne, predominately its outer north, to form what is the largest population of Macedonians outside the Balkans and northern Greece. Their stories of persecution and migration are important to our national cultural history, but as decades turn and generations age, these stories risk being untold. Water Like Ink is a community life writing project, with the aim of capturing life stories from the Aegean Macedonian diaspora in Melbourne.

This project began as I found a three-page memoir of my late great-grandmother, and began transcribing the stories of migration from my great aunt. Water Like Ink will be published as a multi-modal community life writing project.

COMPLETED PROJECTS

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A BODY AT THE EDGE OF LANGUAGE:
WRITING ANOREXIA, BULIMIA AND RECOVERING

(PhD in Creative Writing, 2020) // read here

Eating disorder / Creativecritical writing / Embodied poetics / Life writing / Somatic writing

This practice-led life writing project explores this writer-scholar's experience of her eating disorder through a series of poetic essays developed from material and somatic writing methods including ink-and-paper, found text, and movement. Through these particular methods, and the episodic acts of the writing itself, this PhD discovers a form of somatic life writing that both demonstrates and analyses the lived experience of this psycho-somatic disorder. This research project responds to the challenges of writing anorexia, bulimia and recovering, by developing material writing methods to negotiate self-erasure, narrative authority and embodied memory on the page. The PhD examines the symbiotic relation between writing and (not) eating in ways that are analogous, metaphoric and mutually affective. It draws on a range of writers and feminist materialist scholars to propose that when the tensions of eating disorder are transposed to language and navigated on the page, moments can be found where bodies and writing are constituted and de-constituted. In locating their life-affirming entanglement, this writing practice counteracts the erasure and containment of the condition.

Examiner’s reports commended the project, stating:

“[the thesis] displays a firm grasp of key concepts and discourses across each of the disciplines it necessarily engages, as well as an ability to critically and creatively engage them, to redirect and transform them”, commending “the depth of research and the intelligence of the creative response”.

“The creative, critical and methodological aspects work in concert in a manner that is exciting and exemplary”. The examiner described it as “an outstanding and original thesis that makes a strong contribution to eating disorder and life writing literature in a number of ways” and “demonstrates Markidis to be an excellent scholar and highly talented creative writer [...] we need work like this in Australia.”

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CREATIVE AND PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH:
SUPPORTING RESEARCH

(Research Service Project, 2021)

Research support / Creative Practice Research / Research Writing

In 2021 I led a cross-departmental project at RMIT, which surveyed and developed creative and practice-based research support for HDRs and staff.

Outcomes of the project included a new suite of research training workshops, new online resources and research repository for creative works.

The project received a Research Service Award for Continuous Improvement at the RMIT 2022 Research Awards.