Book Launch Event:

Strangeness & Oddities: Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research

📅 March 11, 2026
🕣 8:30 PM (UK Time)
📍 Online Event – Hosted by the London Arts-Based Research Centre

Join us for the online launch of the newest issue of our creative research series, Indelible Inquiry, titled Strangeness & Oddities: Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research.

This evocative volume explores how strangeness, anomaly, and the uncanny can become powerful pathways of inquiry within arts-based research. Moving across psychology, surrealism, philosophy, spirituality, and creative practice, the contributors investigate the unusual as a source of knowledge — revealing how imagination, symbolism, and the extraordinary open new ways of understanding the self and the world.

Rather than dismissing the strange as marginal or irrational, this collection embraces it as a vital epistemic force, inviting readers to consider dreams, monsters, synchronicities, surreal imagery, and artistic experimentation as legitimate modes of research and discovery. The book explores how oddity itself may be central to the process of individuation and creative becoming.

Through essays and visual work that bridge disciplines, the book invites us to rethink the boundaries between art, psyche, science, and imagination, offering a compelling vision of scholarship that welcomes ambiguity, wonder, and transformation.

Contributors:

This issue brings together an international group of artists and researchers whose work engages the unusual from diverse perspectives:

• Cassie Fielding – The Surreal Self: Oddity as the Art of Selfing
• Leandré le Roux – Psychology of the Unusual: Unnameable Monsters of Bioculture Beyond the Visible
• Rosalyn Carlos-Bustamante – Exploring the Psyche and the Paranormal Using Sequential Art Structure
• Sunitha Singh Thakur Kshatriya – Science and Spirituality: A Unified Inquiry into the Physical and Metaphysical Self
• Cairi Jacks – Uses of Enchantment: The Transformational Potential of Wonder
• John Eric Hamel – GIANT

The programme includes the following:

• Introduction to the book by the editors
• Readings and reflections from contributors
• Discussion on strangeness as a mode of inquiry
• Audience Q&A and open conversation

Join us for an evening exploring how the strange, the uncanny, and the imaginative can reshape our understanding of research, creativity, and human experience.