Category: Publications

Authors: Carla Rice, Andrea LaMarre, Nadine Changfoot, Patty Douglas

In this article, we explore our experiences as researchers and participants in multimedia storytelling, an arts-informed method wherein we work with artists and aggrieved communities to speak back to dominant representations through film. In positioning ourselves as storytellers, we do research with rather than “on” or “for” participants, allowing us to connect in practical and affective ways as we co-create films. Drawing from dialogues about our workshop experiences, we outline four themes that make the storytelling space unique: reflexivity; structure and creativity; transitional space and reverberations; and fixing versus being/becoming with. We analyze our self-reflexive films on mind-body difference as “biomythographies,” as films that situate stories of ourselves in technological-temporal-spatial relations and that highlight how we make/experience change through creative research. Multimedia storytelling, we argue, allows us to enact reflexive creative praxis in a way that opens to difference rather than trying to fix it, forging an ethic we find all too rare in the neoliberal university.

Authors: Emily R. M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, Andrea LaMarre, May Friedman, Tracy Tidgwell

What lessons about linearity are illuminated by the stories that engage our experience of queer fat bodies? The authors examine stories generated in the collaborative, community-based research project Through Thick and Thin. They analyze a selection of 3- to 7-minute microdocumentaries produced in the project that feature assemblages of queer sexuality, gender expression and identity, and other privileged or minoritized identifications (race, disability, class, indigeneity) in confrontation with weight-based stigma, expectations around eating and exercise, and experiences of pathologization. The authors argue that linearity requires a constant labor of improvement that seeks to restore and recover fat queer bodies to imagined state(s) of normalcy/health. By using concepts of queer and crip time, the authors illustrate how queer subjectivity—queered in terms of not only sexuality, but also body shape and size, and/or eating dis/order practice—finds itself out of sync with time: that is, how the project’s storytellers are refused or engage in acts of refusing available futurities and instead construct and live subversive temporalities. In the authors’ range of examples, they show and value how Through Thick and Thin storytellers, and by extension persons with queer and non-normative embodiments, live and move through and in effect, re-make time.

Authors: Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Kirsty Liddiard, Jen Rinaldi, Elisabeth Harrison

Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes.