Sounding the futures imaginary: A collaborative intra-modal storying methodology
(2023)
author(s): Rachel Horst, Kedrick James, Yuya Takeda, Esteban Morales, Effiam Yung
published in: Research Catalogue
The pandemic is not one coherent narrative but an unbounded multiplicity of narrative ravellings. One theme that can be traced through the course of the past two years is the undoings and redoings of normalcy, including normalcy in qualitative research. Our digital literacy research group took up the pandemic as a canvas upon which to story new futurities and possibilities for qualitative research in physical separation within the context of slow-moving upheaval. At the outset of the first physical lockdown in March of 2020, we began a collaborative and multimodal futures fictioning practice, storying new communicative possibilities and potentialities. Over the course of fourteen months, we reached into each other’s imagination, isolation, temporality, and physical environment via story and sound. This exposition charts our diffractive fictioning methodology, in which we collectively map communicative practices and collaborative meaning in virtual spaces in a time when coherence and consensus have become radically fractured. A cyborg skunk moves through this assemblage of poetry, sonification, narrative, performance, theory, and silence, flicking its many imagined tales and nudging its noses at the wreckage of the normal in search of difference.
Dialogic Liminality: Cartographies of the Inbetween
(2023)
author(s): Rachel Horst, Andy Hoff
published in: Research Catalogue
A conversation is a mapping of the spaces in between and within subjectivities, geographies, environments, soundscapes, and silences (of voice and thought); in conversing we abide by certain rules of negotiation while breaking others of propriety, manner, logic. In this exposition we aim to explore and enact the liminalities that occur in an artistic dialogue over the course of a series of weeks and reflections. In our capacity as settler scholar feminist artists and researchers, we are interested in understanding and performing scholarship via artistic practice. For this exposition, we negotiated a series of rules for our weekly inquiry. These rules became the map through/by/against which we navigated and re/defined our scholarship, disciplinarity, and research practice. In this work, we create places of overlap and divergence in a fluid “feeling cartography” (Cram 2016), which is “a mode of encounter and trans-ing, entanglement and movement without destination or conclusive points of arrival” (143). This is also a performance of autotheory, which Fournier (2021) describes, as a term “for works that exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds, that flourish in the liminal spaces between categories, that reveal the entanglement of research and creation, and that fuse seemingly disparate modes to fresh effects” (2). Liminality as a theoretical concept emerges out of a diverse body of entangled life work and struggle. We are thinking with those feminist scholars and artists of colour, Anzaldúa and others, without thinking over the specificities of experience. As Barad notes, “Anzaldúa understood the material multiplicity of self, the way it is diffracted across spaces, times, realities, imaginaries” (2014, 175). We take up this material multiplicity in our artistic practice through a lens of posthumunism, which we see as a theoretical pathway into those spaces between agencies and atoms that may simultaneously define and undo us.
