2.10 Bagladies Scrapbagging: Storymaking as a collective feminist praxis

The aim of this ‘scrapbagging’ workshop is to put to work collective storymaking as a vessel to make kin, rhizomatically connecting others through the intimacy of sharing and (re)making knowledge(s) together through the medium of scrapbooking and collage. We are a collective of researchers who adopt the name Bagladies to playfully put to work a feminist praxis inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) narrative storymaking (Ovington et al., Forthcoming). This workshop will bring researchers together from across education disciplines and interests, nurturing connections with each other by creating stories together that will collide, disperse, cross-pollinate, and compost with thingly-power (Bennett, 2010). 

The physically restrictive conditions brought about by the Covid pandemic couched writing and knowledge-making practices as daunting events for the yet to be revealed becoming~collective of four early career researchers. As the knowledge-making practices we had previously relied on were brought to a halt, we were inspired by disruptive ways of doing qualitative research to ‘produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently’ (St. Pierre, 1997:175).  This meant coming together and supporting each other through kin-ship in troubled times. The original collective of four researchers over the last three years (Albin-Clark et al. 2021) has grown and now spans the globe, with new cluster~collectives flourishing in spaces anew, storying together and apart (Latto et al., 2022).  

Our becoming~collective praxis is firmly rooted itself in Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1989), and Haraway’s notion of ‘kin-shipping’. As Le Guin (1989) explains, stories are bags, or receptacles, used to collectively gather food to share and nourish others. The ‘food’ for us is feminist materialist and posthuman theories that nourish us to challenge knowledgemaking practices as a feminist endeavour. We feel a growing urgency to find ways to undertake educational research and (co)create ethically response-able practices and alternative knowledges. At its heart, the baglady~narrative~methodology praxis is a generative and hopeful pedagogical move. We disrupt the marketised and metricised academic machine by enacting an inclusive, capacious, and generative approach to knowledge-making practices within education, where we (re)imagine the impact and focus of our qualitative inquiries, to reveal other becoming~collective kin-ships ethically (Albin-Clark et al., 2021). 

In this workshop, participants will collectively engage in arts-based storytelling inspired by Haraway (2016). We experiment with a practical and creative scrapbooking/collage activity that invites participants to be inspired by storytelling to (re)make new stories through an embodied material-discursive activity (Fairchild et al., 2022). Participants will be asked to bring an object that fits in their bag, then will be invited to share an object~story that will allow (new)stories to be generated and shared through the act of scrapbooking/collage. 

Artful practices ‘afford an embodiment of posthuman theories, an entanglement with materiality and affect that establishes empathy, alters perception, or disturbs the status-quo’ (Flint, 2018). Scrapbooking and collage as an approach to research-creation allows the transformation of old objects into a new life, as materials are ripped apart, stuck together in new formations, in an ongoing experimental patchworking process (Vandecasteele et al., 2021). 

The act of ‘scrapbagging’, as a way of creating new stories for our bags, allows a performative becoming that has the potential to produce different knowings. As Vandecasteele et al. (2021:6) describe, when ‘you experiment with another medium, you enter through a different door and a new world can unfold’. Therefore, by moving away from centering language in our story-telling practices, to the generative and material practice of scrapbooking/collage, it becomes possible for us to engage with more affective and embodied shared landscapes, where new forms of knowledge unfold through our collaborative creative inquiry (Pyrry, 2022). 

Timings:

20 minutes - Introduction to the #baglady~narrative~methodology as a lively, relational research-creation process (Manning & Massumi, 2014).

20 minutes - In small groups, participants will share an objects and exchange stories about what those objects mean to them

30 minutes - Creative materials will be made available for doodling and artistic responses, producing a new story in response to the stories that have been exchanged

15 minutes - Stories will be gathered and shared, creating new food for our collective bag(s).

5 minutes – Summary and close of session

• Albin-Clark, J., Latto, L., Hawxwell, L., & Ovington, J. (2021). Becoming-with response-ability entanglements, 4,(2), 20-31. 
• Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
• Fairchild, N., Taylor, C., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2022). Knowledge production in material spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. Routledge.
• Flint, M. (2018) Cartographies of Memory & Affect: Nomadic Subjectivities. Art/Research International, 3,(2), 6-19.
• Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
• Latto, L., Ovington, J., Hawxwell, L., Albin-Clark, J., Isom, P., Smith, S., Ellis, S. and Fletcher-Saxon, J., 2022. Diffracting Bag Lady Stories and Kinship: Cartogra-ph-ying and Making-With Others in MoreThan-Human Affirmative Spaces. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 14(1), pp.152-165.
• Le Guin, U. K. (1989). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota Books.
• Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the Act. Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.
• Ovington, J. A., Albin-Clark, J., Latto, L. and Hawxwell, L. (Forthcoming). ‘Disrupting qualitative research. A bag-lady-narrative-methodology’ Routledge Encyclopedia of Research Methods.
• Pyrry. N. (2022) Hanging-out-knowing: The potential of dwelling with our affective landscapes of research-creation. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 13, (3), 64-80.
• St. Pierre, E. A. (1997) Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), 175 – 189.
• Vandecasteele, M., De Schauwer, E., Blockmans, I. & Van Hove, G. (2021) RE-TOUCHE: RE-STITCHING FISSURES THROUGH AFFECT IN FAMILIES WITH A FAMILY MEMBER WHO IS LABELLED AS DISABLED. Art/Research International, 6, (2), 478-504.