'Storying otherwise’ towards care-full writing practices in higher education

Abstract

In this paper, ‘storying otherwise’ (Haraway in Terranova, 2016), as a radical act of deliberate experimentation, is utilised to explore care and care-full writing practices in higher education. We think-with care and care-full writing through a posthumanist lens, drawing on an experimental writing session at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry 2024. Diffracting the stories that were created in the session, we employ e-zine making as an analysis method to open up different possibilities and new realities. In doing so, care is framed as a creative and sensorial act of connecting across time, prompting us to reconsider what care-full writing might involve. When care becomes an act of connecting with past/present/futures, we make different stories, rememberings and imaginations come to matter in writing. Enacting care creatively by partnering with our environments, materials, and other bodies through experimental and collaborative forms of writing allows care with others to be expressed, shared, explored, and valued differently. And, acknowledging the sensorial experience with/in writing, connecting to what is collectively felt around writing, opens the writing space up to shared experiences that expand collective capacities for engagement. We conclude with suggestions for deliberate and provocative writing spaces that allow those creating academic writing (including students) to engage with the entanglements of past/present/future, material and the sensorial, from which different writing emerges. In doing so, we argue that writing can be an important space for care-full practices in academia.