Abstract
A journey that we have been travelling along for the last few years has been a research project that explored engaging with the experiences of queerly identifying tertiary students. This project involved collecting and analyzing stories, and a lot of dialogue, reading, writing, and thinking. This journey has been bound up in describing, investigating and critiquing ‘what is’; including the relationships between contexts and the lives, experiences and journeys that take place in those contexts. This journey has in turn provoked further thinking, talking and writing, and this has provoked even more understandings and preoccupations. This chapter continues our journey but shifts the focus from analysis and critique of ‘what is’ to scribblying, imagining and articulating ‘what might bes’. In particular, we will discuss and demonstrate a diffractive imaginative strategy that we call fable-ing/telling tales-ing/true story-ing/creative writing that we deploy to help emergent unformed thinking and journeying towards and into ‘what might bes’. We also include excerpts from fables that we have written. This fable-ing is driven by persistent preoccupations or re-realizings that research projects have provoked or made clearer. At the same time we argue that they do some of the work of laying the foundations of experiences, lives and contexts yet to be.
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Notes
- 1.
We recognize that these are a diverse set of practices that have many differences. Robert Graves (1960, p. 12) also distinguished many different fictive genres from true myth, including philosophical allegory, sentimental fable, moral legend, heroic saga, realistic fiction etc. We would argue that these different modes share creative and arts-based dimensions. In this instance we will call these various modes fable-ing as a generic term.
- 2.
In Chapter 4 we focused on the productive affective potential of poetry. In this chapter, we focus on the possibilities afforded by fable-ing to imagine and journey into ‘what might bes’.
- 3.
In solidarity we welcome the individual, social, cultural and political benefits afforded by indigenous story telling and the growing interest in story telling practices that we have identified in this chapter. We aim to engage further with the possibilities that other cultural traditions of story telling and fable-ing can offer in future work. And in speaking about future work, in an academic text, we note how this is an unusual practice and how this positions this text as a kind of squigglying..
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Interlude: Post-post Return—Cultural Contexts That Are Supportive of Diversity
Interlude: Post-post Return—Cultural Contexts That Are Supportive of Diversity
So we’re nearly at the end of a book arguing standardizations are bad and that standardized systems can limit opportunities to work in non-standardized ways. We have also argued that we work in an environment of proliferating standardizations. At the same time we have written this book and have responded to this situation by writing in non-standard ways. How so? Because cultures that seek standardization are never monolithic in their reach. We worked the gaps. We worked the edges that were available to us from within the standardized system and connected with other non-standardized centres. We worked in edge/centres. And contrary to what might seem to be the case in a culture where standardizations are very present and non-standardizations are seemingly absent, these ideas and spaces are relational, intrinsically linked and dependant on each other, and we would argue generative of possibilities. In other words we have played with deconstruction and dialectics.
In many parts of this book we have reflected on unexpected moments that have caused tension or revealed multiplicities. On reflection we argue that these moments have often surfaced at the point where the creative academic subject meets the standardizing and normalizing neoliberal university or other context. This meeting place where moments of frustrations or multiplicity are present can also be places of awareness that illuminate absences. In writing about such moments what can be revealed are the conditions that might be present in environments supportive of creativity and diversity. This book has been an attempt to explore and illuminate these conditions.
- Michael::
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speaking of unexpected moments she had a white plastic horse or was that a unicorn?
- Mic::
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yeah it was milky white a bit off white
- Michael::
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I remember wet feet in the one between 1 and 2 … was it a dream but that fridge?
- Mic::
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I can smell off bacon, it’s making me feel a bit sick and hard to think about anything else
- Michael::
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a space between, a pool between, between 2 fables
- Mic::
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an edge and a centre and a between and all squiggly wording
- Michael::
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all full of quotes and sidelines and mash-ups
- Mic::
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we’ve just got to keep experimenting, in a systematic way
- Michael::
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The one between 1 and 2 is very this phrase beside that phrase
- Mic::
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what if there wasn’t frustration … death?
- Michael::
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the one between 1 and 2 is a space … like a New York apartment
- Mic::
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alright, got to feed the dog first
- Michael::
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it’s the closest we get to maybe painting with words - to our own ‘year of the monkey’
- Mic::
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yeah I get it – ha ha
- Michael::
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this doesn’t make sense does it?
- Mic::
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not meant to
- Michael::
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you know I met a bunny once who said he knew a pigeon
- Mic::
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where was the rabbit in the one between No 1 and No 2?
- Michael::
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it wasn’t there as yet
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Crowhurst, M., Emslie, M. (2020). Fable-ing/Telling Tales-ing/True Story-ing/Creative Writing: A Critical/Collective/Auto/Ethnographically Informed Process Aiming to Deepen Analysis of What Is and Support Imagining What Might Bes . In: Arts-Based Pathways into Thinking. SpringerBriefs in Arts-Based Educational Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37507-2_7
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