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My presentation draws on my forthcoming book Exploded Views, which concerns a kind of process-oriented scholarly writing. “Exploded” writing refers to a digressive—even interruptive—documentary practice that accounts for the sunken labor that constitutes the everyday elements of a scholarly or creative project. What might it mean, I ask, to emphasize rather than smooth over the existence of this labor when writing about one’s research or research-creation? The descriptive term "exploded" alludes to exploded-view diagrams, which demonstrate in two-dimensional for how a complex, three-dimensional object is assembled. In the context of scholarly writing in the humanities, an “exploded” view of this kind might serve a similar function in documenting the hidden labors of a project, from intuition to administration. I’m particularly interested in tracking the kinds of labor that tend to be scarcely recognizable when a creation process succeeds. It’s when a project doesn’t fully work that the work becomes easier to recognize. Exploded Views thus proceeds from a series of open-ended projects, whether ongoing, abandoned, or otherwise gone awry.