Freyja Wang
Asli Atasoy
Johanna Kretschmer
Paula Kaskel
Sarvin Jebreilzadehkaregar
Nara Hagh
To quote Audre Lorde, the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house. The goal of the case is to explore how storytelling, and doing arts and crafts around the kitchen table as we discuss feminist and anti-colonial science studies can help gather the joy, care, relationships and imagination as building blocks for practicing anti-colonial science. Feminist and anti-colonial science studies point to hierarchies in the day to day practices of science, and point to the hierarchies experienced as harm in bodies impacted by cishetereopatriachy, ableism, racial capitalism, and colonialism. We will lead with a bodymapping exercise, and then offering expressive and heart centered engagement such as kitchen table storytelling, poetry, and doodling to prompts that zoom in on joyful and relational acts in the participants lives, and picture building and transforming research practices from these acts.
To Elaborate
This is a one-day exploration
Structured in 3 phases
Around the kitchen table with lots of space to move
5-10 participants alongside 3 case organizers
Maybe less, but not more
We are looking for kitchen spaces big enough for the session
We will look for a place with wheelchair accessibility
We will try to set up a low sensory space to duck into
The session will be in English but we can adapt to German and Mandarin
The session includes theater and movement
and we are reflecting on ableism on what we think of as valid movement
We’d appreciate if you bring photos along
To prompts such as: who do you wish to uphold through your research? What would it feel like, sound like, look like when you achieve that? (informed by Leanne Simpson’s As We Have Always Done)
How do you experience joy in your knowledge-creation practices?
We intend to facilitate care, play, and feeling knowledge quiet or loud in our bodies
An intended outcome is for everyone to create a performance
Their own anti-colonial research practices toolkit
Rooted in their bodies, of course, and their life and research experiences
But more important
Is to explore the process of creating these performances together, and apart
Making a shared method situated in the participants and the space
The method we propose starts with theater exercises in phase 1
To attune ourselves to our bodies, to each other, to the space
Also to invite thinking about how our bodies are when we do research and show each other
Build a shared language from more than speech
With that, we will prompt everyone to draw an outline of their body, doesn’t have to be their body
And offer prompts like: how did it feel in your body when you were positioned like this during your research?
Depending on what emerges in the situation
We might get to hierarchies in academic spaces, how it shows up in our bodies, we might get to joy and care in our research process, what it feels for research to be like ceremony (Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony)
Important is the specifics of how it shows up for us in our bodies
Mapping the knowledge situated in our bodies, the knowledge making situated in our bodies
Then we offer free writing spacetime
You can also collage or draw
To sketch out the memories, stories, thoughts that came up for you during this process
And once you are done we take an half hour break
Between phase 1 and phase 2
Although we will also strive to maintain a major sense of ease in the timing and intensity of the activities, as an access need mentioned by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in The Future Is Disabled
So now with phase 2, we will use a talk circle format around the kitchen table
For everyone to share what they want about their bodymaps, and freewriting/sketching/collaging
With no interruptions until everyone’s had their turn
Then time for open floor chatter with tea
Moving to the photos we ask people to bring in
We once again go around and share the photos, tell stories threaded around them
Taking relationality as key to knowledge creation
Introduce each other to the relationships that ground our research
Also key is relational accountability
So we write a letter to a relationship that grounds our research
Now, with another break in between, phase 3 is to wrap up all we did
Going back to the theater exercises
We build images with our bodies that relate to joy, care, and relationality in our research
Imagine how your body would be
Would be in relation
Feel free to incorporate photos, drawings, quotes from readings as props
And take phrases from your writings as speech
Connect your movements, your utterances, your props
Connect our performances to each other’s
Before gathering back at the kitchen table to conclude the day
With another cup of tea
Although this is our plan for the day
It is more of a bag of tools than a procedure to follow step by step
Like the last time I wrote a detailed session plan
I was also prepared to attune to what emerges and what stories come up
Once I show up to the space and meet the participants
And in the end we threaded through my session plan with our stories
And beautiful loops and spirals
Questions you may have
What would we be telling the stories about? What are we bringing from Bielefeld?
I think the best way to answer this question might be with a story. Our experience of facilitating such explorations previously is that this case is very much situated and responsive to the participants, the space, and the relationships present. While we have prepared a structure for the case, which stories come up and are comfortable/able to be shared depends on, as mentioned, who is there, the space, the relationships present in the space. But we have also prepared bags of stories to prompt more stories. Here is one:
One of my friends recently went through their PhD candidacy exam in Canada. They asked me if I had time to do a practice exam with them beforehand, to listen to their presentation and ask questions. They are organizing songwriting circles with professional musicians and a concert for their PhD project, to see if communal music making and listening can help people cope with eco-grief and eco-anxiety, as a climate change and mental health project in public health. They prepared a great 20 minute presentation, their research project was very clearly explained and easy to follow. But I had a hard time listening and sitting still in my chair during some of it. There was a part where they talked about why they decided to explore the potential of music as a coping tool, which consisted of them going through a list of findings from psychosocial studies on the benefits of listening to and music: music has been found to have such and such effects, to promote… so we got to the end of their presentation and I was really eager to ask: so you know where you talked about why you decided to involve music in your project and referenced all of those studies, is that all that happened that you read those studies and were convinced? I’m really curious if there are more stories there. And after some back and forth, they said: yeah I knew music is important because music has been a big part of my life, you know I was in a band, my best friends are musicians and you know my minor was music in university, and I know community is important for listening to music because I once went to a concert where someone was homophobic to me and I felt like my body was going to explode
I thanked them for sharing that and we talked about how that felt like an important piece to their role as the researcher working on this project, and when I asked why they didn’t mention that during their presentation or any of the previous times they talked about their research, they said: because it felt like the story is not something I should bring up in that presentation or the academic spaces. It’s too informal. Too personal. How would it fit with the rest of my presentation, rest of the material? We talked about colonial research standards of the disembodied voice, and I’m really feeling that here.
I wanted to throw out this story to ask, are there stories that are important to your research that you haven’t been telling/centering when you talk about your research?
Why do we engage in storytelling and bodymapping?
Storytelling is as an important epistemic practice in many ways of knowing and research frameworks that resist and decenter colonialism, such as evidenced in Indigenous, Black, Chinese, feminist, and disability justice literatures among others. Stories can facilitate attention to specificities and relationalities that colonial logics have positioned as inferior to discontextualized knowledge. Therefore, being attentive to stories can help situate knowledge creation and facilitate anti-colonial research practices. Moreover, Opaskwayak Cree researcher Shawn Wilson’s Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods says to do research is to grow relationships between the researcher, the community and the topics being studied. And as a relational practice, storytelling can facilitate growing relationships. As for bodymapping: bell hooks have discussed academic spaces as a place for learning hierarchies and ways of being, and Sara Ahmed, through her work on the politics of emotion, highlights the manifestations of hierarchies in academic spaces on bodies and behaviours. We are interested in the bodies of researchers as sites of resisting colonialism and exploring anti-colonial possibilities, and we take up bodymapping to draw attention to these aspects of embodiment, and also to connect with the roots of bodymapping as a method in anti-oppressive activism.
What aspects of science studies are we engaging with? Who are we looking for as participants?
Coming from the Institute of Studies of Science at Bielefeld University, all the facilitators of this case have multidisciplinary backgrounds spanning natural sciences, social sciences and science studies. Our formative STS theorists include Donna Haraway, Banu Subramaniam, Kim Tallbear, Sandra Harding, and we developed this case in line with their feminist and anti-colonial science studies work of understanding how science and colonialism are intertwined, and asking what stories tell stories to tell the stories that would facilitate doing anti-colonial science. We understand science studies as relevant to natural and social sciences but also to disciplines such as literature, history and arts because science has been positioned relative to many ways of knowing, so notions of what science is are relevant for many disciplines. So the case is developed to be flexible and applicable to researchers in natural sciences, social sciences and other disciplines. For example, one of the facilitators is working with a group of physics researchers to go through the exploration process outlined in the case, as well as a mixed group of culture studies, literature, philosophy, and natural science researchers.
The case is suitable for researchers from any discipline interested in decolonizing their research practices. You are welcome if the case description resonates with you!