With a longstanding career as an editor of publications related to artistic and curatorial practices, I was increasingly struck by how little attention was being paid to the complexity of the highly collaborative networks of production, dissemination and reception that publishing relies on. To explore how persistent hierarchies of value in different kinds of work in the art world could be challenged, and by extension my editorial practice could be (re)situated as part of a spectrum of contemporary curatorial activities, doing a PhD emerged as a potential strategy. While undertaking my PhD, I continued teaching and was managing editor of several critical curatorial anthologies, copy-edited issues of an open-access peer-reviewed journal and worked with several artists on publication projects. Although these circumstances seemed ideal for an active exploration of the questions I wanted to address through practice, my chosen approach suggested I take on what Bruno Latour calls a ‘controversial authorial agency’ and articulate my thinking as it developed by way of descriptive writing. Although my theoretical anchoring points would eventually shift towards ideas posited by Isabelle Stengers and Karen Barad, write I did, eventually submitting a thesis with close to the maximum word count. In this essay I detail how undertaking my PhD in the context of a more traditional university rather than an arts-oriented context highlighted that understandings of practice vary greatly and that what I understood as my own needed clarification. I consider how the shift in focus from a descriptive approach to the embrace of Stengers’s idea of ‘ecology of practices’ paired with Barad’s notion of ‘intra-action’ proved to be particularly productive. Applying a combination of their critical propositions allowed me to develop a comprehensive assessment of what I felt were shortcomings in current ideas of ‘the curatorial’ and how an analysis of my mode of practice might contribute to filling a gap.