Carrying stories: digital storytelling and the complexities of intimacy, relationality, and home spaces

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, we have worked alongside storytellers to bring their stories into the world. These encounters have been challenging, exciting, and intimate. In this paper, we reflect on a digital/multimedia storytelling project in which we engaged with people who have experienced weight stigma in fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood care. We use the metaphors of story midwifery and surrogacy to describe the methodological-substantive interplay between what we do, how we do it, and what emerges in this (un)doing. In this reflexive and methodological paper, we engage with the affect and relationality of doing storywork. We reflect on and theorize around embeddedness, othering, belonging, power, shame, and joy in research encounters. Pragmatically, we consider how relational ethics combine with exhaustion and logistical challenges. Finally, we explore the tensions inherent to (co)producing stories at the boundaries of neoliberal academic temporalities and structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• reproductive health
• arts-based methods multimedia/digital storytelling
• weight stigma

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the participants who shared in the storytelling process for this project. We also thank the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for funding Reproducing Stigma (#137019), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (#35254) for funding our storytelling infrastructure, and Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice for supporting the storytelling process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ May also created her own story, working with Hannah and Andrea.

² We conducted this work several years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [Operating grant #137019].

Notes on contributors

Andrea LaMarre

Andrea LaMarre is a lecturer in critical health psychology at Massey University, Auckland. Her research is primarily focused on eating, health, recovery, and embodiment.

Carla Rice

Carla Rice is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences and Founding Director of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. She specializes in disability and embodiment studies and in arts-based research methodologies with a focus on changing systems and fostering social well-being and justice.

May Friedman

May Friedman is a faculty member at Ryerson University in the School of Social Work and in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture. Her research looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines.

Hannah Fowlie

Hannah Fowlie is a PhD candidate in the Social Practice and Transformational Change program at the College of Social and Applied Human Science (CSAHS), University of Guelph. She has a background in social work and a lifetime love and involvement in the arts, as an actor, director, and aspiring filmmaker.