Before the New Year, academics and members of the operations team at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter came together to produce a collaborative zine about rest (and its possibilities) over the winter holiday. Individuals with varied creative experience became engrossed in the process of crafting with their ideas and feelings about their research, their physical and emotional energy levels, their desires for the future, and the possibilities of rest within neoliberal academia more broadly.
Thinking after a seminar presentation I had delivered on the topic of zine-making as a methodology that can/should be applied across many aspects of the research process, including in moments between research events, we each produced a page of the zine. The presentation was deeply embedded in feminist new materialist theory and approaches to knowledge production which thus became entangled with the pages individuals made. Scattered across the table, I had left snippets of text written by Gloria Anzaldúa (2009), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989), and Donna Haraway (1997) to be explored, cut up, and blacked-out to produce found poetry. These texts focused on the body, words and writing, imagination, the self, feminism, more-than-humanism, and science and technology. They were not chosen for their relevance to rest, rather the notion of what it means to write, produce, and research. Thus, the blacking-out of words with a Sharpie has enabled the gaps, the absence, and the rest, to be pulled out and repositioned in the text.
There was a broad range of materials, gathered largely from the Exeter Scrap Store who recycle unwanted scraps of materials back into the community for affordable prices. I filled half a basket with wonderfully decorated and random pieces of paper, small mirrors, and foil for £2! I find that the broader the range of materials, the more groups are inspired to create, finding the particular types of creative expression that suit their onto-epistemologies. I suggest that when seeking to explore a theme, rather than the value of one particular creative form such as painting or poetry, it is valuable to provide as much choice as possible within collaborative arts explorations, otherwise ideas might be curtailed by one's skillset or interest in a particular form.
If the project is to enable creative thinking broadly, I apply Brian Massumi's (2010) notion of the 'enabling constraint', attributed to craftivism (i.e. craft activism) by Fitzpatrick and Konturri (2015), to reimagine the zine as a boundary of potentiality: the format of the booklet maintains communicability between itself and others like it, yet the contents can differ dramatically to include collage, poetry, drawings, storytelling, painting, etc. Thus, within a single workshop, individuals can produce knowledge in ways that suit their mode of being in the world, for example the capacity of their bodies for creativity, and their way of knowing the world, such as the form of expression that has the most affective and productive meaning-making capacity, whilst maintaining cohesion.
Part of this approach draws upon the concept of response-ability (Bozalek et al. 2018), which we also applied to thinking through our capacities as researchers for rest, to consider how methods can enable a response. We have a responsibility to ensure that individuals have the ability to respond in the manner that suits them to the research question, or inquiry, or topic. This aligns with Barad's (2007) concept of ethical-onto-epistemology in which ethics, ways of being in the world, and the knowledge we produce about the world are inextricably entangled. To be ethical researchers, and perhaps also to be fair to ourselves, we must allow ourselves and research collaborators to create knowledge in diffractive ways.
Many thanks to all the contributors for the WCCEH zine!
Rebecca Flemming
Michael Flexer
Gemma Lucas
Katharine Cheston
Vivienne Bates
Grace Redhead
Alex Hillman
Fred Cooper
References:
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2009. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bozalek, Vivienne, Abdullah Bayat, Daniela Gachago, Siddique Motala and Veronica Mitchell. 2018. "A Pedagogy of Response-ability." In Vivienne Bozalek , Rosi Braidotti , Tamara Shefer & Michalinos Zembylas (Eds.). Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp 97-112.
Fitzpatrick, Tal and Katve-Kaisa Kontturi. 2015. Crafting Change: Practicing Activism in Contemporary Australia. Harlot 14(6).
Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Massumi, Brian. 2010. On Critique. Inflexions 4: 337-340. Available online: http://www.inflexions.org/n4_t_massumihtml.html. Accessed 18th April 2023.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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