Supervisor: Dr P. A Skantze 

New Materialisms are methodologies and textual readings applied to provoke and invigorate critical theory. They traverse through the errors of binary and hierarchical thinking. This research into NM asks, what are the transformative potentials of practice as research to intervene in the continuing construction of my capitalist subjectivity? I will be working with the performative metaphor ‘the doldrums’ a colloquial, maritime term associated with shiftlessness and dis-orientation. This research asks in what way a performance practice might be deployed to shape a feminist intervention into ‘the doldrums’ disrupting a cyclical stratification of advanced capitalism. The result of this research will be a performative practice alongside a written thesis. The performance practice has two key elements: the diary of the doldrums and a final performance; the central notion of the diary is to explore and document my own lived experience of ‘the doldrums’ – the mundane and banal documentation of logging a life in the centre. This investigation will deal with two notions of ‘the centre’ - capitalism and class, and will deal with these from my position of being a white, female,middle-class academic and artist. The final performance will be informed by the processes of documentation and by the finished text, exploring the capabilities of live performance to illustrate and disrupt. The notion of an endurance of the doldrums will take into consideration Henri Bergson’s theory of ‘pure duration’ and ‘clock time’ and will form a framework, asking if these are locatable within my praxis. Theoretically I will contextualise my practice as feminist new materialism after Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, crafting outcomes through the locatability of human identity and the engagements with place and space. My research will explore the possibility of performance making in order to energise dialogues into the stymiedpotential of subjects within advanced capitalist processes