The baglady-storying provocation

The seeds and germs of stories are all around and you will fall over them every day’ (Ovington et al., Forthcoming).The aim of this Game Changer is to put to work storyingas a vessel to make kin, rhizomatically connecting others through the intimacy of sharing and (re)making knowledge(s) together. This event will bring researchers together from across disciplines and interests, nurturing connections, and spaces anew to cutacross communities of researchers and inquirists. By creating stories together that will collide, disperse, cross-pollinate, and compost with thingly-power (Bennett, 2010) in/with/through our emergent #baglady~narrative~methodology of affirmative praxis (Ovington et al., Forthcoming) to initiate collegiality and further develop how researchers can work~together and apart to disrupt dominant qualitative research practice. In this Gamechanger event, participants will collectively engage in arts-based storytelling inspired by Haraway (2016) around the topic of making Higher Education more accessible, with the aim of thinking differently about how to engage with diversity, and challenging the existing Widening Participation agenda.Working~with affect (Strom and Mills, 2021) we challenge the status quo of feeding the marketised and metricised academic machine and its regime of performativity, we have coined as ‘academic churn’. This churn privileges knowledge-making as a solo endeavour. We disrupt this by enacting an inclusive, capacious, and generative approach to knowledge-making practices, 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).Narrative research-creation provokes new inquiries, experimentations, and flourishing (Manning and Massumi, 2016) and this storytelling Gamechanger poses the following questions of ‘knowledge-ing’ (Taylor, 2021, p. 30):•How can we affirm practices where we can operate as individuals with/in/through the academy and nurture resistance and feminist activism through collegial confederations?•How can we imagine diversity and welcome difference within the Academy, as an alternative to the narrow approaches implemented under the existing Widening Participation agenda•How are we moved to act with kinship~ing as a #baglady praxis to create new spaces of belonging within the Academy and wider society?•What complexities are entangled in widening #baglady research-creation to move beyond ‘clique-y-ness’ into inclusive practices?Allow us to introduce the #baglady collective...The physically restrictive conditions brought about by the Covid pandemic couched writing and knowledge-making practices as daunting events for the yet to be revealedbecoming~collective of four early career researchers.As the knowledge-making practices they had relied on were brought to a halt, they were inspired by disruptive ways of doing qualitative research,considering ways in which they could ‘produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently’ (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 175). Coming together and supporting each other through kin-ship in troubled times (Braidotti, 2019). The original collective of four has grown and now spans the globe, with new cluster~collectives that have flourished in spaces anew storying together, and apart.The becoming~collective praxis firmly rooted itself in Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (2019; 1989), and Haraway’s notion of ‘kin-shipping’ (Latto, et al., Forthcoming). 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 in the Anthropocene. We feel a growing urgency to find ways to 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 kin-ship. In this propagator, we experiment with practical and creative sessions that invite participants to be inspired by storytelling to (re)make them as an embodied material-discursive activity (Fairchild et al., 2022). Consequently, participants will be asked to bring an object that fits in their bag, then share an object~story to inspire (new)stories about what it means to belong in the Academy and wider
ECQI2023: Face to Face AbstractsUniversity of Portsmouth | 11of 130society, and what role does the Academy have in creating spaces of belonging, throughcreative experimentation and collaborative inquiry