Finding friends as an adult is really difficult. As a child it’s easy to approach someone, state your name, and ask if they want to play: sorted. As an adult such an approach might be frowned upon or at least raise a quizzical eyebrow. Although tricky, friendship – or to use Haraway’s (2016) word, ‘kinship’ – is important for support within academia. Devenish et al. (2009) suggests peer support and collaborative working patterns are important to progress in HE due to the competitive and often marketised systems. The advice is pointedly at finding your fellows – but this brings us back to that first statement: finding friends, allies, kin, can be a real challenge.

The #baglady methodology responds to that statement by explaining how four early career researchers (ECRs) found each other through storying with objects. To find out more about their becoming-collective you can read the Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry article or listen to their recent BERA podcast.

Their initial kinship expanded into several academic spaces including a Friday night book club where others joined in to work through some heavier posthuman philosophies. More kinship grew, not just out of trying to understand the difference between an assemblage and a rhizome, rather through the affirmative relationships they nurtured. Drawn together by what Bennett (2010) would call ‘thingly-scent’, as time has gone by they have put their kinship to work to model how the #baglady methodology can ripple through established systems drawing in others to affirmative and supportive ways.

The name #baglady was inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s (1989) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Le Guin theorises that rather than telling stories of what is in each of our metaphorical bags, it is important to tell the story of the bag (Isom, 2023). As #bagladies, each of our bags are constructed for a different purpose, able to hold various objects, philosophies, worldviews and life stages. The notion of the bag brings us together and the sharing of those bags and what is within them is how we might build kinship across and with difference. We remain curious about aspects of each other’s bags and enact Audre Lorde’s words, ‘for women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered’ (Lorde, 2018, p. 17). Our bags are objects by which we build our stories.

‘As #bagladies, each of our bags are constructed for a different purpose, able to hold various objects, philosophies, worldviews and life stages. The notion of the bag brings us together and the sharing of those bags and what is within them is how we might build kinship across and with difference.’

Our workshop at BERA Conference 2023 (Tuesday 12 September, 1.30–3pm, MB 227) invites participants to bring their diverse bags and engage in redemptive nurturing (Lorde, 2018). We will model what it is to story with objects, to de-hierarchise relationships with the more than human as a way of revealing the threads that connect us in what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as a rhizome. To get a taste of what that looks like you’re welcome to view a recorded version.

During the workshop, participants will be invited to find kinship by being encouraged to story with the more than human in response to others’ stories. As Culshaw (2018) writes, arts-based methods, such as those we will use in the workshop, ‘can help us think beyond the limits of the spoken word, whereby the process of creating a collage [story] can uncover meanings that might otherwise not have come to the fore’. The hope is that bringing #baglady storytelling to others will lead us into an unimagined, collegiate space where alternative stories can be created. We believe that stories can give us hope, as we use storytelling to both explain our present while simultaneously attempting to ‘weave a new world into being’ (Krawec, 2022, p. 22), creating a tiny pocket of ‘what if’ within ‘what is’.

References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Culshaw, S. (2018, February 12). The unspoken power of collage. BERA Blog. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/the-unspoken-power-of-collage

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Isom, P. (2023). He whakakapinga: The use of narrative and metaphor to consider a philosophy of education. In P. T. Maro & R. Averill (Eds.), Ki te Hoe! Education for Aotearoa. NZCER Press.

Krawec, P. (2022). Becoming kin: An indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future. Broadleaf Books.

Le Guin, U. K. (1989). Dancing at the edge of the world: Thoughts on words, women, places. Grove Press.

Lorde, A. (2018). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Penguin.