Статті в журналах з теми "Creative Healing Inquiry"

Collage from "found" visual imagery is widely employed as an accessible medium for expression and illustration in educational, therapeutic, and recreational contexts. Given the history of collage as a strategy of criticism and subversion in the fine arts, visual researchers seek to develop a methodology of collage as a means to knowledge, affording insight into the negotiation and embodiment of media imagery in subjective experience. Highly relevant issues of body image and eating disorders are addressed through the presentation and analysis of a self-study series of collages and life writings. The resulting intuitive "figures" of anorexia demonstrate the creative potential of collage to reconfigure experience excluded from standard texts, and suggest alternative interpretations of both suffering and healing on an individual and cultural level.

This article offers a definition of the transdisciplinary inquiry approach (Montuori, 2010) and demonstrates how this approach can benefit the nursing profession in our process of shifting our paradigm toward caring, love, and healing. The article provides an example of a transdisciplinary approach to change process in nursing. It considers the phenomenon of resistance to change in nursing academia, which has created obstacles to revising pedagogical processes, resulting in ongoing difficulties in creating change in the practice setting. A model based on transdisciplinary practices for creative change in nursing is described.

This article outlines the rationale and best practices for helping young people recover from the trauma of sexual abuse using integrative and therapeutic Yoga practices. As a model for such work, we describe a specific program, Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse with Yoga, currently offered by the authors in the Portland, OR area. The program serves both girls and boys and has a teen leadership component to allow older youth to serve as role models for preteens. This article outlines the necessary steps for working with this population, including self-inquiry, training, program design, teaching strategies, and integration with other therapies and services. A full eight-week curriculum is described, with focal points for each class, as well as suggested poses, mantras, creative activities, and mindfulness practices. The article also addresses specific contraindications and risk factors and ways they can be mitigated. Finally, it covers observed outcomes from two sequential eight-week sessions of the Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse with Yoga program.

We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking walks in Paris locales, viewing women’s art, and engaging arts-based inquiry methods such as journaling, life writing and creative embodied practices, as a way to pay attention to and document our daily experiences. We practiced what we call companion pedagogy, with a feminist focus on mothering and gifting relations. We find that arts-based, restorative practices strengthen our wellbeing and resiliency as educators, and also support our desire for a more nurturing, mothering humanity to come forward for gifting a healing education. Healing education begs the question of how to address the resiliency of educators over time through what are increasingly challenging and depleting conditions of institutional cultures and economies. We thus offer creative practices such as studio residencies for collective care and gifting that can nurture a restorative pacing of life, while supporting the resiliency of educators to gift their energies towards creative curriculum visioning and enacting of social change.

Interdisciplinary psycho-spiritual research into workplace stress and self-care is scant noting the fact that negative self-talk and harsh self-judgement stymie the search for inner meaning and self-care. To address this, this article uses an intuitive and reflection-oriented methodology to research self-care choices for the stressed and suffering worker. In particular, it breaks new ground because no workplace-based applied psycho-spiritual research uses bricolage, let alone the heuristic inquiry process which gives expression to it. Bricolage is a tapestry of ideas, themes and possibilities cobbled together to produce creative outcomes. It adapts and co-opts whatever information from whichever discipline that is necessary. This approach appears well suited to the subjective, intuitive nature of workplace stress and suffering and especially where interdisciplinary approaches to self-care are warranted. The heuristic inquiry process which is used for the first time for workplace self-care works intentionally with interior resources that may be unknown or fragmented and dialogues sensitively with inner ‘rules’ or patterns that may have become problematic. Incubation and reflective illumination produce tacit knowledge to augment healing intuition. This process is illustrated by an example. It is about a less intense focus that actively encourages tender, ‘standing apart’ from symptoms so as to allow perspectives to arise and the intuiting of transformative possibilities. From this, self-compassion, humility and meaningful detachment are re-affirmed as ways to pay self-kindly attention and address self-criticism and self-blame. The contribution of the study is threefold. First, it extends bricolage to workplace self-care by considering inner resistance and negative self-talk, both barriers to self-care. Second, it affirms the heuristic inquiry process as an intuitive method for self-care research. Third, and paradoxically, it shows that self-engagement, in a compassionate yet less intense way, can lead to self-care transformation. Finally, limitations to the study and possibilities for future research are discussed.

This research study was an interpretive inquiry into the experience of contemporary peacekeepers healing from trauma. Ten contemporary peacekeepers were interviewed who have sought treatment for trauma resulting from deployments to Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. A thematic analysis of the text was undertaken in which themes emerged to document and understand the ways in which contemporary peacekeepers suffer while healing from trauma. Narratives from the transcribed interviews were reviewed with the participants and reflective journaling by the researcher provided further clarification of the data to understand the experience. The peacekeepers’ descriptions of the situatedness of their bodies in time, space and relation provided a fresh way into understanding the embodied nature of suffering while healing from trauma. Three overarching themes: the centrality of brotherhood and grieving loss in the military family; the centrality of time and the body in suffering while healing from trauma; and the military response as betrayal and creating trauma from within emerged from the inquiry which will contribute to more effective practice guidelines for the care of contemporary peacekeepers suffering and healing from trauma.

Background: Anxiety disorder patients tend to feel that they are misunderstood and judged. Their lived experiences were understudied in clinical setting where the focus is mostly on their response to treatment. Apart from the stigma associated with the disorder, they face negative social perceptions, which affect their ability to interact with their community, disrupting their healing path. A narrative account in mental health can lead to the creation of a healthier society. This research examines how people with anxiety disorders view themselves and ascribe meaning to the stigma surrounding their condition. Method: A narrative analysis of case studies in Europe, each patient sharing their in-depth lived experiences with anxiety disorders. Results: Nadir's experience was initially expressed and as the participants gained a moderate, balanced level of self-awareness through narrative approaches, they quickly develop coping strategies that are essential to their recovery. Conclusion: Narrative mental health might be an area that needs refocusing during the treatment of anxiety disorders patients.

This Indigenous métissage explores my engagement in Indigenous Arts-based Inquiry as a practice of Anishinaabe Ozihtoon or Indigenous making and knowledge generation. Anishinaabe Ozhitoon is a site that unlocks the theoretical potentialities of the intelligences within Indigenous Knowledge practices in contemporary contexts and reanimates Indigenous land-based assurgence. Reviving Indigenous artistic practices, as sites of co-imagining through constellations of co-creation, is part of ecological and community-based reconciliation and healing. Key to this process is the act of reciprocal recognition, a core practice that fosters ethical relationality, helps cultivate our Indigeneity, and honours the circle of life. This Indigenous métissage tracks the Indigenous pedagogical processes and Indigenous art making used in my own praxis and inquiry as a scholar while I worked in a university to create three pathways for trans-systemic knowledge creation: a university-wide President’s Dream Colloquium with an accompanying graduate course; a graduate diploma in Indigenous Education: Education for Reconciliation and a master’s in Indigenous Education: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Resurgence; and the Indigenous Research Institute initiation of an Indigenous Ethics Dialogue process as a trans-systemic pedagogical engagement with Indigenous and Western Knowledges, values, and ethics.

Low back pain is prevalent in sport and the lumbar disc is a pain generator. Conservative care of these physically demanding patients is not consistent as outcome data has not established optimal strategies. Investigating disc injury mechanisms using experimental models will contribute to the creation of treatment strategies that will take into effect movements to avoid and minimize to reduce unwanted strain on the injured tissues throughout the recovery process. Additionally, how disc tissue acquires nutrition would help provide insight into activities that may facilitate the ability of disc tissue to sustain health and promote optimal healing. Rotational forces and compression in trunk-flexed positions may inflict injury to the annulus and endplate structures. Activity to facilitate nutrients through the endplate into the nucleus of the disc and restriction of exasperating movements may be effective in returning athletes to their desired levels of performance efficiently. The purpose of this review is to inquire possible disc injury mechanisms and how they occur in sport. It will also address recommendations for treatment interventions based on disc healing and metabolism evidence.

This paper presents core findings of the explorative research study on individuals’ living experiences in nature using Moustakas’ (1990) qualitative method of heuristic inquiry. One-on-one interviews were conducted with six co-researchers between the ages of 29–59, lasting between 75–105 minutes, from which several shared themes emerged. Co-researchers revealed how personal difficulties in their lives gave rise to a desire to go into nature to find healing. Nature was deemed to be non-judgemental and provide space for feelings to surface, be acknowledged and integrated, creating the possibility for healing and spiritual growth. Nature was perceived as healer and teacher, providing the opportunity to discover a sense of oneness and connection with nature and the self. This also promoted some degree of altruism and an increase in the intrinsic aspirations of the co-researchers. There was a consensus that language cannot adequately express nature and transformational experiences. Understanding the dichotomy of human and nature as separate appears to be a key step in the journey, resulting in the realisation of our commonality and connection. Results indicate that human-nature connection is essential and intrinsic in human beings and the research findings illustrate the potential psychological, physiological, physical, and spiritual benefits.

Nicotine is the primary component in cigarettes that is responsible for the negative effects that tobacco has on the body. Nicotine is also the primary component responsible for the addiction that can develop from smoking. Tobacco addiction is also primarily caused by nicotine, which is another component of tobacco. Aim: The effect that nicotine has on the rate at which bones can recover after being shattered is still a topic of ongoing debate. The study of bone repair and regeneration is made a great deal easier by the utilisation of a model that is known as distraction osteogenesis. The mandibular extension of a rabbit model is serving as the subject of the inquiry that is now being conducted. Duration & Place of Study: October 2018 to March 2021 Rashid Latif medical college Lahore Method: Using the rabbit as a test subject, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence that nicotine has on blood perfusion, angiogenesis, and bone formation. There were a total of forty rabbits, and they were distributed among the control group, which received no nicotine, and the nicotine group, which received nicotine. The bunnies were distributed to the several groups in a haphazard manner. It was discovered that each rat had been exposed to nicotine or a placebo for a total of seven weeks during the course of the experiment. After a period of consolidation time ranging from two to four weeks post osteotomy, the animals were slaughtered and their mandibles were removed. After this, there was a lag time of three days, and then there was active distraction for eleven days. Utilizing the techniques of Laser Doppler monitoring and Collagen IV immunohistochemical labelling, respectively, allowed for the assessment of both vascularization and blood perfusion. Studies that were radiographic, histological, and immunohistochemical in nature were carried out in order to investigate the development of bone. Result : According to the findings, being exposed to nicotine led to an increase in the density of microvessels, but it had a detrimental effect on the flow of blood and the development of bones. In addition to this, it was found that the expression of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)-2 in osteoblasts was lower than it had been in the past. In the process of distraction regeneration, ischemia and a low oxygen tension were both present, and the creation of cartilage islands on a consistent basis was a sign of both of these circumstances. Result: As a result of our investigation, we got to the realisation that nicotine consumption slows down the process of bone regeneration. We hypothesise that this takes place as a result of the fact that nicotine leads to ischemia and has an effect that is directly inhibitory on osteoblastic cells. It has been demonstrated that nicotine causes an increase in angiogenesis; however, this improvement is not adequate to compensate for the harmful effect of vasoconstriction caused by nicotine.

This publication is the second of two newsletters published in this issue of Art/Research International. This newsletter is followed by a commentary and references for both newsletters. Funding from Research Impact Canada, VP Research & Innovation University of Alberta and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study mobilized evidence-informed knowledge from “Image, Body, and Voice: Supporting Girls’ Sense of Wellbeing,” a participatory poetic inquiry with grade-6 girls in an inner-city school in Alberta, through professional community engagement. At an afternoon workshop, held during spring break with in- service teachers, leaders, and parents/guardians, activities central to the research were shared for the goal of generating mutual benefit skills and knowledge. It offered experiential opportunities, including the creation of mini body maps, and a combination of strategies to support mental wellness, including culturally aware methods for diverse populations, intended for social inclusion and freedom from discrimination and violence. Newsletter 2, as research creation artifact, sought to support teachers, leaders, and families during the onset of COVID-19, when K-12 education moved to on-line delivery and health regulations required social distancing. The content shared beyond “Image, Body, & Voice” sought to support school staff and families through information about compassion fatigue, soul weariness, the power of play, the centrality of the body in healing, emotional regulation and traumatic events. This newsletter is one of two research documents provided as follow up to the attendees of both funded events.

Abstract. In this article, the authors discuss how the Rorschach can be useful in certain Therapeutic Assessments (TAs) by creating an opening for clients to report and discuss past traumatic events that have not previously been resolved. Two case examples are presented. In the first, a 31-year-old woman sought psychological help to understand why she was so afraid all the time, why she did not know what was best for her, and why she was so influenced by others’ opinions. The client saw many disturbing percepts in the Rorschach and was very unsettled afterward. During an extended inquiry she revealed an extensive history of physical and sexual abuse that she had put out of her mind and never told anyone about previously. Talking about her trauma with the assessor helped her understand why she was struggling. In the second case, a 35-year-old woman experienced a flashback when presented with Card X to finding her father after his suicide when she was 8 years old. The client had not previously recalled the details of this event, which were verified by family members. Retrieving this memory helped the client understand her family better and resolve problems she had in her adult romantic relationships. We believe there are essential elements that permit such therapeutic events to occur: (1) the power of the Rorschach to access split-off affects and memories, (2) the secure relationship created in TA that allows for traumatic material to emerge safely, (3) the technique of scaffolding in TA that helps locate clients’ growing edge, and (4) how client–assessor collaboration creates an intersubjective field in which nonlinear healing events may occur.

Ethnobotanical researches reflect the conventional learning of a region. Over the previous decade, medical plants which used for healing indigenous people has become a significant notion among the people and impacted improvement of scientific and ethnobotanical knowledge and investigations of eliminating health problems. A public database has been based on data assembled from various verifiable sources, including journals, travel records, and treatises on therapeutic plants, composed by explorers, botanists, doctors, researchers who went to the nations during the most recent three centuries. In addition, ethnobotanical data depicted in chronicled natural accumulations and in Ancient and Medieval writings from the inquired district have been incorporated into the database. The databases have to be sufficiently adaptable to illustrate a valuable tool for analysts who need to store and analyze present and past ethnobotanical data from the researched location. The ethnobotanical researches are improved in Azerbaijan day by day. The database is used for informing people about some national plants which are growing in the different region of Azerbaijan. The ethnobotanical databases from different countries are analyzed in this article. There are used some special methods for comparing the differences among these databases as data mining and text mining. As a first step the suitable databases are gathered for our investigation, then are defined the best information systems that are used in many countries’ biologists and scientists and the end is observed advantages and disadvantages of all existing ethnobotanical databases which we researched. The features of information systems are evaluated. The results demonstrated each of databases has its very own quality, but none has turned a standard form for universal research. The reason is very basic: none of these databases enable specialists to include their own information. There is also illustrated sample structure, main tables and key components of the ethnobotanical database. The obtained results, while a few ethnobotanical databases existing, none are satisfactory answers for worldwide work, and none enable analysts to include their very own information. There is a need brought together all essential properties of existing databases, and creating a free database that encourages ethnobotanical research. Due to the rise and quick improvement in the field of data advances, it has now turned out to be conceivable to digitize, oversee and make ethnobotanical information accessible to a more extensive gathering of people.

This paper summarizes research first presented in an unpublished dissertation by the author (2005). A rigorous art-based, heuristic methodology in the tradition of Clark Moustakas (1990) examines the author’s own experiences with songwriting, spanning over 25 years. Compelling images reveal themselves in the inquiry in songs, dreams, painting, and sculpture as harbingers of human shadow, with undeniable auto-ethnographic features. A model for conceptualizing songwriting in particular and the creative process in general as vehicles for psychological understanding and healing is explored and described for art therapy and music therapy practitioners. The theoretical grounding emerging from this study pays homage to Hillman’s work (1977), highlighting an image’s autonomy, intent, and a sense of “otherness” owing to emergence from an imaginal realm (versus consensual reality). Images in this context are understood as not only visual but apparent in and able to be rendered through a variety of art modalities. The text highlights (and hyperlinks) a progression of original songs produced in the study, songs that parallel the academic learning and culminate in a final, musical “creative synthesis.” A complete song list, an index of images, and references are included.

Imagine a future where technology is liquid, where the human senses are entirely wet, foggy, mushy, and gooey. Where everything and everywhere is liquefied and watery. Where humans evolve into pluviophile (love of rain) and hydrophile species. Imagine what state our depressed and suicidal bodies would react to and sustain in this hyper-watery world. This thesis set out to reimagine and recreate my personal experiences with depression, anxiety, and suicidal behaviours through a wet, watery, emotional, and hyper-futuristic narrative. The project aimed to design and create a series of immersive multi-sensory environments that provide therapeutic and healing spaces for mental health and well-being. Thus I have been informed by my personal story through imaginary water worlds and speculative fiction writing as a method of inquiry. These immersive multi-sensory works explore various emerging creative technologies to help realise my thesis project, such as using sound, interactive installation, digital, and extended reality (XR) technologies. I have used my own body, bodily experience, and personal feelings as a storytelling tool and primary material for my master's project. Water plays a significant role in my creative research and practice. Also, it hugely influences my writing, providing therapeutic and healing qualities. The approach to my research has drawn from methodological perspectives, including autophenomenography, first-person narrative, sensory ethnography, and speculative fiction through creative practice. I am using 'water' as a metaphorical guideline for methodological approaches to tie together as one, connecting these bodies of watery perspectives into an oceanic methodology. The significance of the research is the engagement and immersion of the multi-sensory environments through creating imaginary water worlds that offer a space for others to swim, dive, and acknowledge these critical issues relating to mental health by sharing personal stories and connections to their own experiences.

As a musician-researcher of Chinese musicians’ journeys, I was confronted with stories that led me to interrogate my own worldviews. As my identity shifted in this experiential process, I became an autoethnographer by serendipity. Autoethnography is storytelling that blurs the boundaries between humanities and sciences, expressing lived experience in novel and literary forms, depicting stories and including authors’ critical reflection on their lives and writing process, with the purpose of transforming self and society. This evocative autoethnography explores the phenomenon of divorce, in reference to my personal experience and another musician’s lived experience interpreted through my understanding as a participant-researcher. This project integrates autoethnographical and phenomenological approaches in the analysis of two intertwining narratives. Two overarching themes will be explored: music as medicine, and divine hope in healing. Musicking and our Christian faith had transformed us from heart-brokenness to survival. I draw on multiple intersections to theorize about these two tales from two generations. This is the essence of autoethnographic research where theorizing takes different forms and can be engaged through multiple points of contact and streams of processing. The retelling of our stories captures something alive, and challenges biases associated with divorce and predicted by cultural norms. Our bi- autoethnography is staged-storied-scholarship that is therapeutic and embodied. It incorporates evocative texts, dramatic narratives and musical presentations that combine to communicate our inner-worlds to others who might share a similar experience. This study explores new directions in finding authentic selves through qualitative inquiry with the creative use of multimedia in autoethnographic performances.

Writing is collective healing to build a community. We, five Vietnamese bodies, enquire, how can individual memories be collective healing to rewrite a better future of education? We borrow Nhat Hanh’s philosophy to touch on our suffering to heal and Barad’s returning as a multiplicity of processes for reconnecting with the pastpresentfuture. We use the recollection of individual memories to share critical incidents of past experiences to build a collective community for healing purposes. We have demonstrated our deep commitment to creating a resilient system in retelling stories and rewriting for hope for educational change through this process.

She lies helpless and fragmented, limbs leaden with story, forced ever further into herself by the viscous shame that suffocates and disables her. Fleshed lips cling to each other, tongue recoils from the sharp taste of the narrative of her body. Within the impotent portal of her mouth, her story sits, an impenetrable oral hymen. — Brenda DowningRape is, without doubt, a catastrophic experience.When rape is experienced in childhood and is also silenced, it can have devastating consequences that carry through to adulthood.In what ways then can the catastrophic memory of silenced childhood rape be coaxed from its hiding place in the female body? How is it possible to make the transition from silenced experience to public articulation? Can creativity fill the body with courage in the face of helplessness and create breath in the suffocating and silencing space of the aftermath? Can creativity help facilitate the personal expression of muted experience?In this paper we will each reflect on the complexities and enabling capacities of the creative and collaborative processes present when negotiating the landscape between the private memory of silenced childhood rape and public articulation and performance. Brenda will retrace the steps of her academic research. She will identify two paths that have taken her from personal and social silence to public voice, and the articulation of her embodied trauma experience through differing modes of creative expression. Alice will reflect on the ways in which preparing Brenda for the journey from articulation and expression to public performance sometimes required moments of freefall full of risk yet also full of creative forces. Images from Brenda’s solo performance aperture will accompany these reflections. aperture is a companion piece to Brenda’s doctoral research and is the creative result of our collaboration.BrendaIn 2008, I completed my feminist and autoethnographic Honours research. This work explored the multiple and significant ramifications of my silenced and silencing experience of childhood rape. Commencing this research as a mature aged woman inevitably involved a movement back through time to revisit 1971, the year of my rape experience, gathering recollections of the aftermath along the way. My memories of the events of that year, folded tight within me since I was eleven years old and enveloped in a shroud of secrecy for decades, had nonetheless been held with full consciousness and silenced in an act of pragmatism that allowed me to function. These were not uncovered or recovered memories; rather they were suppressed and revisited. I didn’t experience a sudden cracking open of lost memory, instead I stepped easily, though not without discomfort, into the archives of my body and reached with outstretched hand. In the gesture, I offered my memories the opportunity to speak, and speak they did.From within my body, stored memories were unleashed and hurled themselves at me. I caught these memories and held them close. I turned them over, set them down, reached again. I reflected, I explored, paused, considered. I sat alongside them. I got angry. I wept. It was as though these embodied memories, these lived subjective experiences, had been crouching impatiently just beneath the surface awaiting release from the repressive silence that had contained them for so many years.But what had helped facilitate this release? Was it simply the opportunity to be immersed in self-reflective and reflexive research? Following the conventionally written academic-style opening chapters of my Honours thesis, sits my autoethnographic chapter. It was no accident of method that I explored my personal experience through creative writing. I didn’t stumble into this medium; I had a compelling and irresistible urge to express my experience creatively. It seemed the only way. When I sat down to write, the sentences were expelled from my body like a series of long-held but desperate exhalations. They emerged as my memories had sat since childhood, blunt, raw and panting, filled with barely-contained energy. They revealed the chaos and disconnection of the body and mind in the aftermath of silenced childhood rape. They disrupted chronology and mirrored shattered identity. Temporally and spatially they were restless birds, unable to perch for too long, nor in one place. Slipping in and out of the first and third person, they struggled to sustain a fixed identity, or perhaps, refused one. Relational threads appeared transparent but were as strong as lines that support the weight of thrashing fish.In the laying down of the multiple layers of my story, I soon realised the writing was serving an additional purpose. It had evolved to become a critical factor in not only the actualisation of my story but also a means of making sense of my experience by locating it within wider familial, social and cultural contexts. The grounding of my experience through reflexivity and the piecing together of my tenuous sense of self became intimately entwined in the creative process. I recorded each evocative exhalation with frantic diligence, as though I mustn’t lose a word. I felt my visibility, my credibility reliant on each syllable and every nuance. I intuitively sensed that the creative re-capturing of my story would liberate my memories from the smothering folds of corporeal darkness in which they had reluctantly huddled and in that liberation, I would also find freedom from the dragging and stultifying weight of their heavy presence. Helene Cixous talks of moments when we are “unwoven weft” (38), when writings or “songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you [...] well up […] surge forth” (39). I’m certain the liberation of story and self I experienced through the creative writing medium, at a point when I too was unwoven weft, gave me the courage to walk in the night shadows of my embodied childhood memories, the light of creativity guiding my way. In making the transition in 2009 from Honours to doctoral research, I carried with me the knowledge that to ignore or pay cursory attention to the materiality of the raped body is to deny its cellular intelligence and its abundant creative reserves. While the researching and writing of my Honours project was deeply satisfying, what emerged for me during that process was an intense desire for a more three-dimensional aesthetic and embodied engagement with my PhD project. I felt the poetics of embodied language and my moving body would satisfy this desire.With the addition of a performance modality I was convinced I could lift the words off the thesis page in order to, literally, bring the information to life. Through performance I knew I could give the bones of the written language of sexual trauma a heartbeat, a pulse, give them breath. I believed a performance held the potential to drape flesh on the words and pump blood through their sentences. I wanted the narrative of sexual trauma to move and sweat, collapse and stand rather than remain in stasis. I wanted the unresolved nature of silenced sexual trauma to permeate the flesh and speak with more than written language. I wanted my raped female body to be fully present. A performance seemed the only way to convey the three-dimensionality of my muted experience. “Performance is a promissory act,” Della Pollock tells us, “not because it can promise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be” (2). When I came across these words, I felt certain that I could create for an audience Pollock’s contract with possibility. Through a performance modality a portal would open to the reality of how it is to live with silenced and unresolved sexual trauma. Beyond that portal an invitation would await for others to engage with the difficulties and compromises of this reality through embodied imagination and somatic empathy. A performance, I felt, could act as a physical, emotional and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not. In the actualisation of this PhD project my role would be multiple. I would take up the position not only of the researcher but also the researched. Through an engagement with the somatic work of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®), my still traumatised body would become the primary focus of the research. Additionally, I would present this work in the solo performance aperture. My body then, would become the site of somatic inquiry, providing the embodied text for the research, scribing the work in symbolic language and articulating the emotional landscape of the aftermath of my trauma through performance. As Tami Spry notes, “words can construct, but cannot hold the weight of the body” (170). The words of my thesis then would construct my story from the findings of my somatic inquiry as well as shape my research but the performance would hold the weight of my flesh in the embodied articulation of my story. But I couldn’t do this alone.Help arrived in mid-2010, when I was introduced to and entered the world of BMC® and the work of Alice Cummins. At times the BMC® work and the creative development phase of aperture felt a little like attempting a base jump with a parachute that might, or might not open. However, with Alice’s depth of knowledge and experience guiding me, I have taken what has been an extraordinarily profound journey of somatic exploration resulting in personal healing, revelation, illumination and embodied performance. AliceAs a dance artist and somatic movement educator, my teaching and choreography are influenced by post-modern dance practices and feminist philosophy. My interests have engaged me with socio-political concerns and how the poetics of the moving body articulates our humanity. In my somatic movement practice I draw on BMC®, the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, with whom I studied in Massachusetts, 1995-98. BMC® evolved in the post-modern dance scene of New York City in the early 1970s and belongs to the lineage of moving research pioneered by Rudolph Laban, F.M. Alexander, and Mabel Todd.Bainbridge Cohen writes:Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) is an ongoing, experiential journey into the alive and changing territory of the body. The explorer is the mind – our thoughts, feelings, energy, soul, and spirit. Through this journey we are led to an understanding of how the mind is expressed through the body in movement. (1)In June 2010 Brenda participated in a three-day BMC® workshop. During an integrative practice of Authentic Movement she experienced pleasure in moving for the first time. This experience was profound for Brenda after a lifetime of repressing sensation and feeling as a way to contain the memory of her rape. To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere. — Louise BourgeoisSo we began.Before embarking on the creative development of performance making it was critical that Brenda did private work with me. Her history was too traumatic to venture into making work from the body without prior therapeutic hands-on work. When trauma has occurred, the tissue holds this frozen as a way to contain the terror. But it lies in wait and erupts unexpectedly when the circumstances stimulate or provoke memory. As BMC® teacher Phoebe Neville (1996) says: “Memory remains in the tissue until we are ready to feel it”. During her two years of private sessions this hands-on work gave Brenda the capacity to feel and helped her develop somatic and personal insight. This provided the leverage for her understanding, and eventually the making involved in the collaborative process. A BMC® hands-on technique I used during the therapeutic process was cellular touch. This dialogue through touch invites the cells to breathe—to receive and process new information. This exchange supported and stabilized Brenda’s nervous system and perceptual response cycles and helped cultivate endurance. Through the BMC® work we created a visceral bond of attachment and trust that allowed risk as provocation towards realization not as re-stimulus and withdrawal. This allowed Brenda to go from a withdrawn physicality to a dynamic performance presence. Without this capacity to be present, we could not have found a vocabulary that might unearth and express her story through embodied performance making. Brenda’s capacity to be “100% available to be seen” (Hay), would allow meaning to touch her audience. I make work with and through the bodymind and for Brenda’s “voice” to be heard I knew she needed to be able to access the intelligence and imaginary life of her body ... to make, to grasp, to reveal her experience. As artistic director of aperture it was my role to discern how the creative met the psychodynamic and became new realisation and transformation. The BMC® philosophy “support precedes change” (Cohen) infused the collaborative process. Our collaboration also involved a constant flow and exchange of ideas, feelings, intuitive responses and imaginings in both verbal and somatic conversation. This process enabled Brenda’s experience of childhood rape to become a way of exposing the silence and silencing that surrounds rape in our culture.One of the specific research skills we practiced in the creative process was Authentic Movement. Developed in the 1950s by Jungian analyst, Mary Starks Whitehouse, it is a practice that relies on moving and being witnessed. As Brenda moved I, as witness, provided the space of containment and safety, both physical and psychological for the moving exploration to occur. It was in the intersubjective space between us that material arose that might otherwise remain held in the tissue. As Starks Whitehouse says: “Movement, to be experienced, has to be ‘found’ in the body, not put on like a dress or a coat […] it is that which can liberate us” (53). This practice gave Brenda the creative and therapeutic space to explore her experience. In crafting the work I guided Brenda’s movement and emotional states through improvisation and experimentation. In paying close attention to the emergent language and meaning of the nuanced moving, I identified moments of creative potential. Risk and provocation, critical to the transformative act of contemporary performance making, was now possible.As Brenda and I moved to performance making, I was unable to maintain the relationship of client/practitioner. Shifting from the clear perimeters of client and practitioner to an arts practice entails risk. I felt I had to choose at specific moments in our work together to step across the line and transgress, though what it is I transgressed I’m now unsure of. I’ve allowed Brenda into my private realm; she’s shared meals with me, met my friends and partner and slept at my studio home. We’ve spent many hours together and the intimacy of the creative process and the material itself forged our friendship as well as the work. I don’t know if this intimacy was necessary to make this work with Brenda. It is what happened. Brenda’s story touched me deeply and I was participating in its evolution. The work is the result of our private work and our creative relationship, coloured by all its variables. Brenda’s experience of being raped as a child is the catastrophe that we mined to make aperture. The ordeal of this experience shaped her life and her relationships. Its aftermath destroyed her capacity to interact in the world with any agency. When someone has lost their voice and their agency how do we help them find it? During a private session in 2010, Brenda experienced re-stimulation of the trauma. This experience became the “aperture” through which Brenda’s healing has come about. She entered the wound and slowly found her voice and her agency. Both literally and metaphorically, Brenda found her self and her story gathered fleshed substance.The making and performing of aperture was a collaborative process made possible through Brenda’s deep desire for healing and understanding. She led and I followed. Sometimes the path felt perilous and yet it was in these moments that I also felt most certain. These were the risks critical for her realization and empowerment. In both the private and the performance work I practiced a state of love that was self-reflexive and dispassionate. In the moments of greatest distress and disturbance I felt a certainty that was irreducible. The dance we were in was one of survival and I felt the certainty of her innate capacity to survive, and my own capacity to follow her. This was not a certainty constructed of ideas but a felt experience based on every skill and nuance I embodied at that moment. I employed my whole life to work with Brenda and the work also moved my life. What I know and don’t yet know is present in aperture. I am privileged to have witnessed Brenda finding her way to “step into the light”, as Antonio Damasio would put it, and move “through a threshold that separates a protected but limiting shelter from the possibility and risk of a world beyond and ahead” (3).ConclusionThe work of traversing the landscape between private memory and public performance has taken us across some difficult terrain. The adoption of a creative approach has been intrinsic to the navigation of this terrain and central to the storying of this catastrophic experience. The creative process has coaxed, shaped and articulated the complexities and sensitivities of this experience in multiple ways, encouraging voice where once there was silence. This story now speaks and moves. ReferencesBainbridge Cohen, Bonnie. Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering. 2nd ed. Northampton: Contact Editions, 2008. Bourgeouis, Louise. What Is the Shape of This Problem. Detail. 1999 Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Jenson, Deborah. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1991. Cohen, Bainbridge. Personal Communication. 28 Jun. 1995.Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. London: Heinemann & Vintage, 2000. Hay, Deborah. Personal Communication. 20 Jul. 1985.Neville, Phoebe. Personal Communication. 4 Jul. 1996.Pollock, Della. "Introduction: Remembering." Remembering: Oral History Performance. Ed. Pollock, Della. Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 1-17.Spry, Tami. Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2011. Starks Whitehouse, Mary. "Physical Movement and Personality (1963)." Authentic Movement: A Collection of Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler & Joan Chodrow. Ed. Pallaro, Patrizia. London: J. Kingsley, 1999. 51-57.

This paper describes a collaborative self-reflexive practice using art-making, personal experience, womanist performance pedagogy (WPP), the Black Arts Movement, and poetry as the starting material for inquiry. Through arts-based inquiry, we reflected on our practice and Black personhood as art therapists, artists, and activists. We investigated the concepts of therapeutic and professional space in three areas: negotiating identity, co-creating our therapeutic practice, and making alternatives. We utilized the seven characteristics of WPP proposed by Khalilah Ali in her dissertation ‘For Us Poetry is Not a Luxury’: A Case Study of Six Black Women Artist-Educator-Activists as a framework, while drawing from care and healing practices from the Black Arts Movement, and using poetry as material. We merge our experience, theory, and action through this collaborative, self-reflexive, exploratory investigation, to better understand how to cultivate subversion and challenge the power structures and systems that we navigate on a daily basis. Our interest in this topic derived from the two alternative spaces that we created during our time as art therapy students: BIPOC Makespace and Sister Circle. We realized that our starting point does not always have to be in relation to whiteness, critiquing whiteness, or talking about our experiences in relation to oppression that has happened in our education. This paper is giving us the opportunity to choose our own starting point and material to investigate, putting Black knowledge, experience, and praxis at the center.

The aim of this paper is to propose a new way of understanding data contemplation for Indigenous methodologies. There is a need for Indigenous methods that allow us to explore and organize findings that are steeped in the contextualized story and grounded in the research relationship. A study that asked Cree Kehte-ayak (Old Ones) about the relevance in harmonizing Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in healing from addiction shows that Reflexive Reflection (RR) offers a respectful way for discovery. RR offers epistemological underpinnings for data consideration when engaging Indigenous methodologies. Culturally rooted addictions research can contribute to Indigenous wellness and cultural renewal by bringing awareness to the link between colonialism and addiction and by actively re-centring an Indigenous worldview and governance in the research process (Hall et al., 2015). While challenging colonialism is vital, the strength of Indigenous culture must be central to the overall project, with relational accountability that implies all parts of the research process are related, and that the researcher is responsible for nurturing and maintaining this relationship with the research process and with “all relations.” Indigenous research inquiry involves moments of contemplation that explore dreams, intuition, teachings, and connection to land. It also involves spending intimate hours listening to stories of the “old ones” that are rooted in a sense of kinshipresponsibility that relay culture, identity, and a sense of belonging that are essential to the life of the researcher. Reframing the language around aftercare services for Indigenous Peoples can take place through reflexive investigation and knowledge creation.

Background: One of the complications of cesarean section (C/S) is related to the incision site. Considering the effectiveness of platelet–rich plasma (PRP) on healing of wounds and management of scars, the present study aimed to inquire the effect of PRP on the thickness and completeness of the uterine scar. Methods: In a randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial, the women who underwent C/S from November 2019 to 2020 were included and randomized into two studied groups, including the control (n = 15) and intervention (n = 15) groups. In the intervention group, PRP, extracted from patients’ blood samples, was injected to the incision site (between decidua and myometrium), while the control group did not receive this treatment. The scar thickness of C/S as the primary outcome and postpartum hemorrhage as the secondary outcome were compared between the groups. Both groups were followed for 12 weeks. Results: The two groups (intervention and control) were not significantly different in terms of weight, height, BMI, age, parity, gravidity, duration of surgery, and blood hemoglobin (HB) level (P > 0.05). Comparison of scar characteristics showed the creation of a niche in the PRP group, which was almost one-fourth of that of the control group; a difference that was statistically significant (P = 0.002). The thickness of adjoining myometrium was comparable between the two groups. Mean uterine niche height in the intervention group was lower than in the control group, which was statistically significant (P = 0.048). The mean of residual myometrium thickness (RMT) in the intervention and control groups were 7.62 ± 0.95 and 5.6 ± 3.5 mm, respectively, a difference that was statistically significant (P < 0.001). Conclusions: Local injection of PRP is an effective and viable measure for reducing the uterine niche; therefore, it is suggested to be included in the routine wound care of CS. Future studies are needed to confirm PRP efficacy in different settings.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. 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Welcome to this special issue titled “Women’s Life and Trauma in Individual and Collective Narratives” of the East European Journal of Psycholinguistics. Narratives, both oral and written, play an important role in helping the individual make sense of their lives and the world they live in. Narrative research is focused on the elicitation and interpretation of people’s narrative accounts of their lived experiences. In recent decades, there has been an enormous growth in the use of narrative inquiry and narrative-based research with diverse theoretical orientations and methodologies grounded in various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities including anthropology, psychology, psycholinguistics, sociology, history and literary studies as well as in medicine and clinical research (Chase, 2005, 2011; Holstein & Gubrium, 2012; Kleinman, 1988; Charon, 2006). According to Chase (2005), most narrative researchers treat narrative as a distinctive form of discourse that shapes meaning through the concerted ordering of story material with speakers providing particular understandings of personal action and experiences by organizing events and objects into meaningful patterns, connecting subjects, actions, events, and their consequences over time. As narrative research has become increasingly complex and rigorous, this special issue was planned to gain insight into the narrative research being conducted by international scholars with a focus on women and trauma, broadly defined. The call for papers attracted many high-quality submissions from authors representing various countries. The special issue contains a collection of ten papers, each providing a unique perspective and understanding of trauma in women’s lives and its reflection in narrative inquiry. Just as women’s voices are varied, so too are the narratives presented. Women are represented as narrators; as subjects of the narration and as characters in the narrative. The authors also present a broad spectrum of approaches to the empirical analysis of narrative material ranging from social media content, life stories, clinical and educational interventions, and literary works. In the first paper of the special issue, Bifulco’s article seeks to explore links between selected investigative child abuse interview accounts using narratives elicited through the Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse (CECA) clinical interview guide and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Counts (LIWC) text analysis programme (Francis & Pennebaker, 1992) which identifies characteristics of speech associated with trauma. Her paper examines the potential of combining these approaches to systematically analyze and interpret trauma narratives. In the second article, the contextual backdrop for the narratives is the COVID-19 pandemic. In her article, Kostruba analyzes narratives collected online to gain an understanding of how specific social restrictions, stay-at-home orders particular to the pandemic affected all aspects of life including psychological well-being. Her study also used LIWC psycholinguistic analysis of these current pandemic narratives to identify markers of traumatic experience and identify possible gender differences in the ways women experienced (and continue to experience) the COVID-19 global pandemic. The importance of social and cultural context is apparent in the next article which draws on literary texts as the source material. For Aguilar Lopez & Miguel Borge, the drama The Gold Ribbon by María Manuela Reina, written and situated in the 1980s, a decade that for Spain implied a more obvious abandonment of the most traditional conceptions of the role of women, serves as the unit of analysis. The authors describe the divergent worldview models of the older versus younger characters, reflecting both a generational and gender divide around topics such as success, infidelity, and matrimony. Aguilar Lopez & Miguel Borge aim to identify if, how and why the dramatist is able to reach out to the general public through her play to create social awareness and give voice to the women who rebelled against the traditional social and gender roles. The next paper in this series focuses on the emerging field of post-traumatic growth (PTG) defined by Tedeschi & Calhoun (2004) as a “positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging circumstances.” Drawing on therapeutic narratives from women participating in a psychotherapy workshop, Lushyn & Sukhenko utilize dialectical understanding and discourse analysis to identify and assess the women’s descriptions and definitions associated with post-traumatic development and growth with a further attempt to provide practical implications for psychological practice. A set of the articles (#5-7) in this special issue target traumas associated with transition, be it gender transition or women and girls transitioning to another life phase (adolescence; menopause) and the emotional, social and cultural experiences connected to these transitions. Martynyuk’s article combines methodological tools of conceptual metaphor theory and narrative psychology with theoretical assumptions of the intersubjective psycholinguistic approach to meaning making and exploring transgender transition narrative metaphors. Her dataset consists of 16 TED talks videos by transgender individuals discussing their experiences of transitioning which provide Martynyuk the opportunity to conduct a narrative and visual analysis of the metaphors that are given coherence by the textual, social, cultural, and historical context of the narrative, as well as by the interactive situational context reflected in the video recordings. The article by Nair & George puts the menopausal woman as the focus of the narrative inquiry. The authors interviewed a group of male spouses about their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about perimenopause and their experiences associated with the physical, psychological, and social changes occurring in the lives of their wives. The menopausal transition can be a period of stress, even lead to trauma if left unnoticed or unsupported. Nair & George used qualitative data software to analyze the interview data and thematic analysis to arrive at themes which could inform programs which could raise awareness about the perimenopausal and menopausal life stages of women to help both partners understand and cope with the individual, family and societal changes which occur during this life period. On the opposite end of the life spectrum, Shirazi et al, investigate whether narrative-based interventions in the school context can increase children’s emotional intelligence (EI) and whether oral and written narrative elements have a different effect on students' EI. The underlying premise is that children share their emotional experiences through narratives and stories and high-quality narratives are beneficial for children’s wellbeing and development. The research project was conducted with almost one hundred 12-year old Iranian girls who attend Yasuj city schools in southwestern Iran. Results highlighted the importance of oral and combined oral/written language modes and their merged narrative elements on the development of emotional intelligence, particularly for children who are in the language minority. The final set of articles (#8-10) make use of nostalgia and intergenerational narratives of historical trauma. Todorova & Padareva-Ilieva apply an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach to describe and classify written messages and images collected through social media in Bulgaria during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Findings revealed that much of the communications through social media during that period was largely nostalgic and that the main role of the Facebook social media platform is to unite people in times of isolation, to raise their spirit and save them from the traumatic experience they may encounter during a global health crisis. Zaporozhets & Stodolinska analyze the concept of border through a content analysis of the Little House children’s book series which are narrated from the lived experiences and perspective of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family in the United States in the late 1800s. The territorial and metaphorical borders depicted in Wilder’s works are interwoven and influenced by her reminiscences of historical, biographical, gender, and psychological peculiarities. This journal issue concludes with a cross-cultural analysis of narrative reflections associated with two 20th century genocides: the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933), and the Holocaust (1939-1944). Zasiekina et al recruited second (“mothers”) and third (“daughters”) generations of Holodomor and Holocaust descendants in Ukraine and Israel to share their family narratives and experiences of the genocide. The study applied inductive thematic analyses that progressed from description to interpretation, and showed the centrality of five emerging themes in both mothers’ and daughters’ narratives. The findings of their research have important implications for future practice of creating narratives with survivors of massive trauma and their offspring and stress the importance of creating a traumatic narrative to aid the healing process resulting from the transmission of historical and collective trauma and provides direction for clinical providers in designing treatment plans for individuals with genocide in their life history. In summary, the articles that make up this special journal issue reinforce the view that narrative research and inquiry provides researchers and clinicians multiple lenses and approaches through which to analyze and interpret narrative data. The subsequent results of each narrative analysis can give voice to a broad range of women and girls, while at the same time guide policy and inform educational interventions and therapeutic programs.

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. 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Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2015.Huang, Vivian L. “Inscrutably, Actually: Hospitality, Parasitism, and the Silent Work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28.3 (2018): 187–203.Japanese Breakfast. “Japanese Breakfast – Everybody Wants to Love You (Official Video).” YouTube, 20 Sep. 2016. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNT7wuqaykc>.Kang, Miliann. The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010.Kim, E. “Unbecoming Human: An Ethics of Objects.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2–3 (2015): 295–320.Liu, Runchao. “Retro Objects, Alien Objects.” In Media Res. 12 Dec. 2018. <http://mediacommons.org/imr/content/retro-objects-alien-objects>.McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Analysis. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2010.Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.———. “‘Gimme Gimme This ... Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” Social Text 31.3 (2013): 95–110.Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.2–3 (2012): 173–196. Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8.1 (2005): 109–125.Sharma, Preeti, et al. “Nail File: A Study of Nail Salon Workers and Industry in the United States.” UCLA Labor Center and California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, 2018.Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Shomura, Chad. “Object Theory and Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2020.Song, Sandra. “Japanese Breakfast Is the Korean-American Songwriter Empowering Everyone to Overcome.” Teen Vogue. 14 July 2017. <http://www.teenvogue.com/story/japanese-breakfast-songwriter-empowering-everyone-overcome>.Turan, Zeynep. “Material Objects as Facilitating Environments: The Palestinian Diaspora.” Home Cultures 7.1 (2010): 43–56.

Our capacity to tell stories is a skill that can be considered both natural and learned. Storytelling and oral history are parts of all human societies, and we seek to understand ourselves and each other through our stories. Our individual and collective memories collide in our stories, and reconcile to construct what Kansteiner calls our "collectively shared representations of the past" (182). It is our personal narratives that are the building blocks to public understanding, and as Harter, Japp and Beck maintain in Narratives, Health and Healing, "narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience" (3). Adding to this idea of narrative as way of illuminating meaning, Goodall posits narrative as also being a way of knowing and as a research methodology, stating "narrative provides us with a range of forms and styles for discovering meaning and communicating it to readers through stories. It is an epistemology" (13). This re-imaging and re-purposing of narrative and storytelling has the capacity to significantly influence and shift the ways in which cultural and social research is carried out. This emerging approach can also influence the ways we understand the experiences of marginalised groups, and consequently how we respond to issues around social inclusion through policy and community based solutions. For researchers personal stories and narratives have the capacity to illuminate the nuances of broad issues; this potential also means that seemingly intractable social problems are given a human face with which to engage. It is in this way that personal narratives energise public narratives and shape our ways of thinking and collective understandings (Harter et al. 4). This paper investigates a digital storytelling project conducted in late 2009 with a group of Forgotten Australians in the months leading up to the public apology in the Australian Parliament, and how the personal stories of the participants brought to life previous research about the marginalisation of individuals who had experienced out-of-home care as children. This paper also explores how the endemic, institutionalised abuse of a group of people was translated to the broader community and galvanised support through the impact of their personal stories. Digital Storytelling As a dynamic practice storytelling, in all its forms, must be nurtured and developed if it is to contribute to the lives of individuals and communities. The number of storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling, initiatives and projects in Australia has increased rapidly since the early 2000s, and are utilised by various public and community organisations for a variety of reasons. Digital technology has had a profound impact on the ability for "ordinary" people to tell their stories, and research has identified the potential of digital storytelling in these contexts to assist in the representation of multiple voices and viewpoints in society through inclusive processes of co-creation (cf. see Burgess; Hartley, Uses and "TV"; Klaebe and Burgess). The storytelling project that forms the basis for this paper used some traditional written storytelling practices but was mainly concerned with digital storytelling. Digital stories are generally a two to four minute multi-media story that uses photographs, film and drawings to convey a personal story which the author narrates in their own voice over the series of images. Much has been, and continues to be written, about digital storytelling as a site of participatory culture and as a means of improving digital literacy in pockets of the community traditionally absent in the realm of digital citizenship (cf. Hartley, Uses; Hartley and McWilliam; Burgess; Meadows; Lundby). As Hartley points out digital storytelling has become such a compelling medium in which to record stories in communities because it "fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media" (Uses 122). As a means of creating narratives digital storytelling has proven to be a significant mode, due in part to its ability to reach a large number of people relatively easily. The rise of digital storytelling partially mirrors the broad shift towards more participatory online culture that privileges user generated content and ordinary voices over official content. The origins of digital storytelling lie in a response to the absence of "ordinary" voices in mainstream media and policy making and grew with the increasing affordability of digital technology. The potential for social inclusion and participation along with the promise of self-representation is implicit in the discourse surrounding digital storytelling. "The ability to express oneself in digital media and in the case of digital storytelling using digital video editing, has become a central literary for full participation in society" (Lambert 85). Social Inclusion in an Australian context is defined by the Australian Government as all Australians feeling valued and having "the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society. Achieving this vision means that all Australians will have the resources, opportunities and capability to" learn, work, engage in the community and have a voice (Social Inclusion Unit). The aims articulated by Lambert in the previous paragraph and the philosophy of social inclusion and the belief that individual stories have the capacity to impact on national agendas and policy lay at the heart of the digital storytelling project outlined later in this paper. The Forgotten Australians As cohort the Forgotten Australians are defined as individuals who were removed from their families, or were orphaned or child immigrants from the United Kingdom. These children were placed in institutions where they suffered abuse or neglect between 1930 and 1970, and it is estimated that up approximately 500,000 children were placed in out of home care during this time. In November 2009 the Australian Parliament delivered a bi-partisan apology to the Forgotten Australians for the pain and suffering they experienced in church and state run institutions. The stories of the Forgotten Australians were beginning to make their way into the consciousness of the Australian public in the lead up to the apology through documentaries on the national broadcasting service and stories in the mainstream media. Like most large groups the demographic of the Forgotten Australians is diverse, within those who identify as part of this group are successful and well-known Australians, along with ordinary Australians many of whom have struggled significantly as a direct result of their childhood experiences. Those involved in this project were considered to be individuals who were quite profoundly marginalised in mainstream society. A number lived with mental illness, the majority lacked stable housing and all had been severely emotionally, physically and sexually abused during their time in State or Church run institutions as children. The apology to the Forgotten Australians was preceded many years of advocacy and activism by community groups and individuals. They utilised personal stories, the digitisation of records and as the apology drew closer a number of digital storytelling projects to bring the personal narratives into the public arena in the hope of affecting change. Stories from these projects were broadcast across a variety of platforms such as YouTube, the websites for the major advocacy groups and community organisations and more recently the National Library Australia website. The stories differed from site to site and served different functions depending on the place from which they were disseminated. Hildebrand identifies the role of YouTube as a site for the intersection of personal experience, popular culture and historical narratives, and, as such, a vehicle for cultural memory "allow[ing] users to seek out the media texts that have shaped them and that would otherwise be forgotten in 'objective' histories" (54). YouTube videos relevant to the Forgotten Australians ranged from locally made stories and documentation, news items and presentations recorded by major organisations, but uploaded by individuals, and also those posted by these institutions themselves. A notable feature of all of these contributions is their role in the representation of witnesses' stories. In the case of reports on Forgotten Australians from major news organisations the commentary they attracted was largely from those who identified as fellow forgotten Australians attesting to—and corroborating—the interviewees' stories. Whether they were posted by survivors themselves or by mainstream media or other institutions, they exhibited a unity around a particular will to memory: setting the record straight through testimony. Here, the clips and posts were characterised by the provision of information as evidence for the assertion of cultural trauma as a shared experience and focus of identification (Adkins et al. 15). Storytelling functions as one of our most powerful forms for experiencing, expressing, and enacting sorrow and pain...it is pivotal in the process of sense making, allowing individuals to cope with chaotic, equivocal, and confusing conditions of everyday life, including illness and suffering. (152) Advocacy and community groups such as CLAN were focused on creating a sense of community amongst survivors with no story or artefact too small or insignificant to be included, which differed slightly from the agenda of the National Library of Australia—the institution of public memory that has been most closely involved in recording and disseminating the stories of the Forgotten Australians. The Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project conducted by the National Library Australia was one of the recommendations of the two Senate Community Affairs References Committee reports following the Senate Inquiries and receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. According to the National Library Australia website, this oral history project will run for three years and aims to document a rounded history of the experiences of the children in institutional care and the lifelong impact of these experiences on their lives and their families. This project will also interview a selection of advocates, and allied professionals including welfare officers, employees of institutions and administrators. (Project Team) In many important ways the purposes served in this project were those of the governments—previous and present, which was to capture and keep the stories, memories, documents and artefacts, and to share the officially selected stories with the rest of the nation, and those stories would support and affirm the government's roadmap for moving on from the apology. These digital storytelling projects, to varying degrees and levels of impact, served to provide the public with the personal narratives behind the issue being presented in the media and by advocacy groups as a large scale issue concerning hundreds of thousands of victims. Although the sheer size of the numbers of children affected was confronting, it was the personal stories that created a momentum towards the public apology. The findings of both Senate Inquiries recommended a formal apology; however this did not occur until the individual experiences of the Forgotten Australians were translated and represented in narratives and, through this, the construction of a sense of cultural memory resulting in formal recognition. Many Australians were sceptical about the importance of a public apology to the Forgotten Australians, as they had been of the apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008. To be a genuine act of reconciliation an apology requires the act of listening as much as speaking, fittingly Prime Minister Rudd quoted predominantly from personal oral history testimonies that had been collected over the years and that were of public record, but had not been digitally accessible to all, as many stories now are in the Bringing Them Home report. The Case Study In August 2009 I was funded by the Australasian Centre for Interactive Design (ACID) to conduct a series of digital storytelling and writing workshops in conjunction with Micah Projects, a community building and social justice organisation based in Brisbane. Micah delivers services for people experiencing homelessness, runs programmes for young mothers and is responsible for the Historical Abuse Network which is a network servicing the Forgotten Australians. After some discussion with the CEO of Micah it was decided that the clients involved with the Historical Abuse Network would benefit most from this project. Many of the participants had been involved in the 2003 senate inquiry into the treatment of children in institutional care. In the intervening years they had told the story of their abuse many times in official contexts and provided statements of harm for the inquiry. However, for this project we wanted to encourage the participants to create stories that allowed them some agency in their own lives rather, to re-claim some of their story from the official framework of abuse, and to use digital storytelling as a tool for this. The participants were between 45 and 65 in age, and were divided equally between women and men. There were a number of complexities inherent in this project, some of which were specific to this particular cohort and some specific to all marginalised individuals and groups. The most significant problem arose out the expectation that the "authors" will bring with them photographs and keepsakes from their lives to use in the stories. Many of the participants did not have photographs of their childhoods or of their families; some did not know how old they were (in many institutions all birthdays were celebrated on a single day, and consequently most lost track of their age and birth date) or had not had contact with their biological family for decades and as a result had few keepsakes. These hallmarks of legitimate biography were absent from their pasts and their presents. The combination of these factors meant that for many the ability to create a coherent narrative about their life or to feel ownership over their life had been seriously compromised. However, it became apparent that by using sounds and images in the digital story the technology was able to create a materiality out of memory for the participants. As it became clearer that the foundation of the stories was memory rather than a narrative arc, the more it became imperative to embrace the fragmentation, inconsistency and incoherence of the memories, and to incorporate these aspects into the digital stories. Instead of being easy to follow or emotionally satisfying narratives, some of the stories had much more in common with what is referred to in psychology and health frameworks as "chaos narratives". A chaos narrative has a sense of disconnected events characterised by a lack of closure and the presence of day-to-day uncertainty (Harter 4). Often such stories seem too incoherent to be told and too painful to be heard by others, as was certainly the case with some of the stories created for this project. Conclusion The Finding a Voice digital storytelling project led by Professor Jo Tacchi aligns with the aims of this project in its social innovation, and the role of storytelling and voice as having the genuine potential to impact on the understanding of poverty and disadvantage. Tacchi states that it "is an approach that allows those who are living in conditions that might constitute 'poverty' to tell those who are not what this experience is like, in their own words. Such an approach might challenge our 'expert' conceptions of poverty itself" (170), and confront mainstream or approved versions of social issues. Carabas posits that the agency embedded in the narrative act reforms or reframes the meanings of events through counter narratives and the act of telling transformed personal and social suffering. Those who had been objects of other's reports started to tell their own stories and rewrite official history in the first person singular (154). For the Forgotten Australians, those involved in this project and in similar ones the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words allowed them to push past the detached, impersonal representation of their experiences. Instead they could re-position the debate to being about individuals and the effect of government policy on their lives, and in doing so agitate for a formal apology. Storytelling and narrative as a research methodology, and as a way of knowing, is continuing to be refined by social and cultural researchers and by community organisations. Despite the emerging and nebulous nature of this field one thing is clear: our human desire to tell stories has the ability to be harnessed to build narratives which create understanding and insight and consequently demand that as communities and nations we respond to injustice and disadvantage accordingly. References Adkins, Barbara, Donna Hancox, and Helen Klaebe. "The Role of the Internet and Digital Technologies in the Struggle for Recognition of the Forgotten Australians." Proceedings of the A Decade in Internet Time: OII Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, 21-24 September 2011. Oxford U of Oxford, 2011: 1-23. Burgess, Jean. "Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling." Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201-14. Carabas, Teodora, and Lynn Harter. "State-Induced Illness and Forbidden Stories: The Role of Storytelling in Healing, Individual and Social Traumas in Romania." Narratives, Health and Healing. Eds. Lynn Harter, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005. 149-69. Harter, Lynn, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck, eds. Narratives, Health & Healing. New York: Taylor & Francis. 2005. Hartley, John. "TV Stories: From Representation to Productivity." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 16-37.———. Uses of Digital Literacy. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P. 2009. Hildebrand, Lucas. "YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57. Kansteiner, Wolf. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History & Theory 41 (2002): 179-97. Klaebe, Helen, and Jean Burgess. "Mediatisation and Institutions of Public Memory: Digital Storytelling and the Apology." Australian Historical Studies 41 (2002): 149-65. Lambert, Joe. "Where It All Started: The Centre of Digital Storytelling in California." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 79-90. Lundby, Kunt. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Meadows, Daniel. "Digital Storytelling - Research Based Practice in New Media." Visual Communication 2.2 (2003): 189-93. McWilliam, Kelly. "The Global Diffusion of a Community Media Practice: Digital Storytelling Online." Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 37-77. Project Team. "Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project." National Library of Australia. 16 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/forgotten-australians-and-former-child-migrants-oral-history-project›. Social Inclusion Unit. "The Social Inclusion Agenda." Social Inclusion. Australian Government, 2011. 19 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/›. Tacchi, Jo. "Finding a Voice: Participatory Development in Southeast Asia." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 167-75.

IntroductionOn a sunny afternoon in early spring 2014, five researchers were strolling through the streets of Old Aberdeen. They had known each other for only a few days since an event had brought them together. The event was Performance Reflexivity, Intentionality and Collaboration: A Sourcing Within Worksession, convened by anthropologist Caroline Gatt and performer Gey Pin Ang, as part of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Knowing from the Inside,” at the department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. This workshop aimed to explore aspects of creative decision-making in performance to assess their relevance to anthropological practice. For three days, participants had engaged in intensive physical and vocal training, seeking to act in ways that felt intuitive and not forced. Five of those participants—Brian Schultis, Peter Loovers, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Valeria Lembo, and myself—unintentionally continued those explorations after the workshop.Our wanderings around the old town took us to the St Machar’s Cathedral. As we were lingering by the graveyard, Valeria took out of her bag a yarn of golden thread. This, she said, was an object of “personal relevance” that she had brought along to the workshop as a prop to work with, following Gey Pin’s instructions. Now she was unravelling it, offering one point to each of us. As we untangled the yarn, we resumed walking. Held from different points, the yarn became a web. Its threads shifted, vibrations reaching our fingertips as we moved. As we entered Seaton Park, which is adjacent to the Cathedral, the threads registered our encounters with the bumpy path, trees, wind, and passers-by as visible, tactile, and kinetic qualities. Pulls, resistances, flows, and gaps triggered a sense of “enmeshment” (Ingold, Lines 11) in a living, breathing world, something greater than ourselves.Walking Threads (henceforth WT), as we retrospectively named the experience, has since developed into a publication (Ang et al.) and a series of invitations extended to larger groups, at conferences and symposia, to walk with the golden thread (walkingthreads.wordpress.com). In our basic WT practice, the yarn is passed around. The thread unravels and we begin to move. No instruction is given to participants, in order to avoid their over-conceptualising the walk. We begin in silence in order to encourage an attitude of “listening,” that is, of opening one’s perceptual awareness to what is happening in the moment. This has not prevented participants from spontaneously using their voice at later stages of the walk, through song, recitation or the exploring of vocal sound.While WT outings are sporadic, the golden thread has continued to be part of my life in subtle ways. Since the last walk in September 2015 at the Beyond Perception symposium in Aberdeen, the thread has repeatedly come to mind. I began to pay attention to these appearances of the thread not as a material object but as a so-called “mental image.” By focusing on the image of the thread, I intentionally recalled some of its properties as a thing that connects, tangles, ties, and is untied, properties that the WT had made salient. By allowing those properties to inform my relationship with my body, the thread turned into a somatic image, a process that I describe in this paper. Thus, this paper continues the WT project’s creative explorations of bodies with threads. This time, however, the thread is not conceived of as a material object but as an image.A few words on my understanding of images are in order. Since 2006 I have been dancing and researching butoh, a dance style that originated in Japan in the post-World War II years. Butoh is a formless dance: it resists codification into a conclusive system of movement, relying on intensified proprioception—the perception of one’s own body—to sustain movement work instead. The use of verbal imagery is widespread among butoh dancers: words act as devices to evoke sensory experiences and “scaffold” (Downey) perceptual attention in order to achieve nuanced qualities of movement. The practice of butoh has informed my understanding of mental images not as merely visual but also as kinaesthetic, that is, engaging the sense of movement. This connection is hardly new; Csordas, for instance, talks of “physical” or “sensory” imagery, rather than merely visual (146–47).While I never intentionally used butoh to relate to the thread, my training and sensitivities as a butoh dancer are likely to have played a role in my relations with this object, as filtered through the WT experiences. Based on my background as a butoh dancer and “thread-walker,” the approach of this paper may be understood as one of anthropology with art: one in which the modes of observation supporting artistic and anthropological inquiries coincide (Ingold, Making 8). An artist’s engagement with materials, tools and things—including the body—is speculative, experimental and open-ended, rather than descriptive or documentary. This type of engagement can question established ways of seeing. For instance, we generally think of objects and bodies as belonging to different domains—the inanimate and the animate, the lifeless and the living. This paper questions this assumption and hypothesises that, through a particular kind of perceptual engagement, which mobilises the somatic and the imaginary simultaneously, objects and bodies can merge. An object can be embodied and, vice versa, a body can become a thing.The paper draws on autoethnographic occurrences of relating to the image of the thread, in the form of short somatic narratives, or narratives “from the body” (Farnell). Each narrative aligns the image of the thread to a particular aspect of somatic awareness: thinking, breathing, and muscle-bones. Far from claiming universal validity, these personal accounts engage a “somatic mode of attention” (Csordas 139) to venture in the potentialities of image-based thinking (Sousanis; Jackson). The exploration finds that, as the materiality of the thread retreats into the background, its image unlocks aspects of self-perception that normally escape conscious awareness (Leder). The image of the thread becomes a perceptual device that, by facilitating access to somatic awareness, reshapes relations with the world and, internally, with the body. It is in this sense that I embody the thread. Beginning with a Loose End: Spinning Thought into Thread-FormAs I begin to write this paper, I witness my thinking taking the form of a thread. It first appears as a loose end. I see it in my mind’s eye, and from a short distance. The loose end of a golden thread floating in a dark space. I cannot see how far it extends. Instead, the gaze of my imagination glides towards its surface as though attempting to grab it. Even so close, I cannot touch it. Still I can contemplate few of its qualities. I meet its reassuring continuity. A glimmer catches my attention: it is a few silver filaments inside the thread, glittering. The thought-form of the thread is a sensation of thin electric current between the temples. I sense the space between my eyes and forehead, their muscles and bones, subtly engaging. The same space begins to narrow down into a corridor. It is narrower and narrower. My thought spins itself into thread-form.In the 1980s, movement therapist Thomas Hanna defined a perspective from inside as “somatic,” that is, pertaining to soma, the ancient Greek word for “living body” (20). The somatic involves the perception of the corporeal from the inside rather than the outside: “to yourself, you are a soma. To others, you are a body. Only you can perceive yourself as a soma—no one else can do so” (20). As a first-person perspective on the body, the somatic involves attention to perceptual processes (Csordas). Yet, in daily life, self-perception is the exception rather than the norm. Being in the world is active rather than reflective (Leder). Otherwise put, being alive requires a mode of engagement that goes “forwards” rather than “in reverse” (Ingold, Making 8).Were we constantly aware of our own presence and actions, this would obstruct their unfolding (Leder 19–20). In order not to inhibit its capacity for being, the body must remain to a great extent “absent” to itself (Leder 19). Some reflective possibilities nonetheless exist. In meditation, for instance, one can attend directly to bodily processes, with aesthetic and contemplative benefits (18–19). The opening somatic narrative presented my visualising of the golden thread as such a kind of reflexive engagement. There, the activity of visualising ceased to be an orientation towards an externally conceived “object” (the thread), becoming itself the end, or object, of perception.One may ask: What kind of sensory perception is mobilised in positing the “visualising” of the thread as “object” rather than as background process? I suggest it is proprioceptively-oriented kinaesthesia or, the perception of self-movement. In this mode of perception, the activity of visualising the thread yields kinetic and spatial impressions. Visualising, that is, is perceived as a movement of attention (Sheets-Johnstone 420–22).The image of the thread, meanwhile, has suggestively merged with the activity of visualisation, in two stages. First, it has guided my attention towards an otherwise-recessive bodily process. Secondly, it has lent its form to an otherwise-indeterminate bundle of sensations. I elaborate on this latter aspect in the following section, where the next somatic narrative posits thinking as a perceptual object, in the form of the image of a web of threads.Seeing through the Veil Walking home one day I noticed some thoughts unpleasantly affecting my mood. In recognising their negative impact, I decided that I should try and detach myself from them. I imagined that the thoughts were like threads woven together. This image of interwoven thoughts developed into another image: a coherent system of thoughts, or worldview, was like a “veil” spread between my eyes and the world. I could, quite literally, “remove” the veil through an act simultaneously of proprioceptive awareness and imagination, leaving my mind uncluttered. As new thoughts rushed in to form a new veil, I could also remove these and so on. As a reminder of this experience, I jotted down these words:If the veil is made of ideasThen thinking is weaving.Sometimes I can see the veilMade of the substance ofMy thoughts.When I see it,When I see the fabricOf thought that forms it,Then it disappears.When I see itWhen I can really see the veil,It’s by a certain way of seeingWhich is in my forehead.To see that way,Really look, with yourEyes as well asWith your mindFor the mind itselfCan attune,Can look, can see through the veil.Leder writes, “insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the perceptual field it discloses. I do not smell my tissue, hear my ear, or taste my taste buds but perceive with and through such organs” (14). Similarly, in ordinary conditions, I cannot think about my own mind. To see through the veil of thoughts requires a reflexive effort. It is to attend to the act, not the content, of thinking.This form of awareness can be seen as gestural, as it calls into play the body—a certain way of seeing/which is in my forehead. It is both a stepping back from thoughts, which allows me to see them as objects (a veil), and a removing of them, as though they were tangible things.Weaving the Body into the Night: Breath and Physical Forces as KnotsThe definition of somatic in the previous section anchors it to the point of view of the perceiver. The next somatic narrative describes how, through the image of thread, the perceiving I dissipates into contiguity with the world. Following my experience of perceiving my own thoughts as a veil, I further practised “moving my thoughts” through that image. One night the image of the veil “moved me,” that is, my entire body, in turn.As I cycle back home in the light rain I sense my own presence weaving in the fabric of the night. The fresh air flowing into and out of my nostrils and lungs, my feet pressing against the pedals, pushing my body up from the saddle, my legs looping. Dynamic energy mingles with currents of air passing through my body, and shining asphalt flowing under the wheels. Rhythm, like sowing my presence onto the air. And though the road is steep, tonight cycling up the hill feels effortless. My mind is empty and alert, engaging with the fabric of reality I can see. Is this “reality” or just my imagination? It would not make much difference to me. This somatic narrative reintroduces the image of the veil on a different scale. Now I see the veil as though through a microscope: myriad intertwining threads, and I am part of it. Threads run out of my limbs and lungs: gathering and propelling, pushes and pulls, in- and out-breaths. They weave with the night’s very limbs and lungs: streets, trees, the hill, the breeze, the deep embrace of the sky.For Ingold “every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines” (Lines 3). Lines are the movements that living beings perform as they relate—“corresponding,” “clinging,” “tying,” and “untying” (3–7)—to other living beings and the world. Breathing also is a line: “as we breathe in and out, the air mingles with our bodily tissues, filling the lungs and oxygenating the blood” (70). Or rather, breathing is a knot: it ties the inside with the outside. “Breathing is the way in which beings can have unmediated access to one another, on the inside, while yet spilling out into the cosmos in which they are equally immersed” (67).Cycling up-hill, breathing in and out, pushing and propelling, is a weaving of my body, a bundle of lines, with the ebb and flow of the weather-world (Ingold, Lines). This image evokes an outer spatial dimension to the body, an opening. It recalls my being one of multiple people holding and walking with the thread in the WT project. As with WT, feelings of resistance, flux, and being part of something bigger emerge.The image of threads feeds into the somatic perception of body-in-action, and vice versa. Here, engaging in action and imagination are not in contradiction but imply one another. They “correspond” (Ingold, Making): it is because my actions unfold through the imaginary framework of the night as veil that they can flow as they do, sinking in perceptual tracks of extended being.Muscle-Bones as ThreadsFor anthropologist Michael Jackson, metaphors reveal the identity of domains of being that the intellect strives to keep separate, such as the cultural and the natural. “Metaphor reveals unities; it is not a figurative way of denying dualities. Metaphor reveals, not the ‘thisness of a that’ but rather that ‘this is that’” (142, emphasis in the original). Whenever a crisis occurs, which undermines the unity of being-in-the-world, metaphors can be called upon to resolve the impasse and to make people “whole” (149).The final somatic narrative is an example of how an image can restore the unity of the physical and the mental. By imbuing the visceral body with the tangible qualities of a thing, the image of the thread turns the absent body into a sentient, responsive body. This, in turn, helps to overcome the impasse created by physical pain.Lying on the floor, sinking into it. The pain has been with me for years now. When stressed or tired, it spreads through the left side of my body. I have begun imagining the pain’s epicenter as a knot inside the pelvis, between left hip and tailbone. Looking inwards, I try and see the muscular fibres enveloping my limbs, connecting top to bottom. I summon the image of the thread. I make its fibres overlap with my muscle fibres. I want the thread to be the muscles, and the muscles to be the thread. This way I can disentangle the knots and find relief. My body is a deep, dark well. Breath is the rope that takes me down. Breathing in and out creates ripples of movement. They gently undo the knot, ease the pain. In this somatic narrative, my body is, once again, a bundle of threads. This time, however, this image has an anatomical inflection. Instead of generic movements, it is my very muscles that are threads. Early modern Dutch anatomist Ruysch also described muscles as made “of many parallel threads of different lengths,” which fitted with his overall view of the human body as divine “embroidery” (van de Roemer 180–82).In the previous section, a knot was a device for binding and securing life relations to survive a world that is, by its very nature, adrift (Ingold, Lines 67). Breathing enacted one such kind of knot “tying” the inside with the outside. In contrast, now a knot is a place of stagnation, of tension, where movement does not flow as it should. Breathing triggers minute movements throughout the body, which allow me to gradually undo the knot, releasing tensions and bringing relief.ConclusionDrawing on personal experiences, this article has sought to show that corporeal relations with an object can transcend its materiality. By engaging imagination and somatic attention, the thread lived a second life within and through my body.Based on the object’s characteristics and properties, the image of the thread refashioned, albeit momentarily, my relation with my body and the world. It allowed me to fill a perceived gap between body and world, between imagining and being.Finally, in relating to “unthinkable” aspects of being—mental and physical pain—the image of the thread was beneficial and even healing. It yielded sustainable notions of the corporeal.ReferencesAng, Gey Pin, Paola Esposito, Valeria Lembo, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Caroline Gatt, Peter Loovers, and Brian Schultis. “Walking Threads.” Humans and the Environment/Walking Threads [Special Issue]. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal 5.1–2 (forthcoming, 2016). Csordas, Thomas. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8.2 (1993): 135-56.Downey, Greg. “Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira Training: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art.” American Anthropologist 110 (2008): 204–13.Farnell, Brenda. “Moving Bodies, Acting Selves.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 341–73.Hanna, Thomas. Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1988.Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013.———. The Life of Lines. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.Jackson, Michael. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011.Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2015.Van de Roemer, Gijsbert M. “From Vanitas to Veneration: The Embellishments in the Anatomical Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch.” Journal of the History of Collections 22.2 (2010): 169–86.

While Young Adult dystopian texts commonly manipulate expectations of time and space, it is largely in a linear sense—projecting futuristic scenarios, shifting the contemporary reader into a speculative space sometimes only slightly removed from contemporary social, political, or environmental concerns (Booker 3; McDonough and Wagner 157). These concerns are projected into the future, having followed their natural trajectory and come to a dystopian present. Authors write words and worlds of warning in a postapocalyptic landscape, drawing from and confirming established dystopian tropes, and affirming the activist power of teenage protagonists in cultivating change. This article examines the intersections between dystopian Young Adult literature and Indigenous Futurisms, and the possibilities for sharing or encoding Indigenous Knowledge through the disruption or revision of genre, where the act itself become a movement of activism and survival echoed in text. Lynette James acknowledges the “ruptures” (157) Indigenous authors have made in the genre through incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into story as an embedded element – not only of narrative, but of structure. Ambelin Kwaymullina, of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, exemplifies this approach in her disruption or rupture of the dystopian genre in her embodiment of Indigenous Knowledge in the Young Adult (YA) text The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Kwaymullina centres Indigenous Knowledge throughout the trilogy, offering a powerful revision of key tropes of the dystopian YA genre, creating a perspective that privileges Indigenous Knowledge. This is most significantly identified through her depiction of time as a non-linear concept, at once realised narratively, conceptually, and structurally in the text. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, the first of a trilogy of novels in “The Tribe” series, presents a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, set 300 years after the Reckoning, a cataclysmic environmental disaster. The protagonist, Ashala Wolf, is one of a number of people with supernatural abilities that are outlawed by their government and labelled Illegals. As the novel begins, Ashala is being interrogated by the villainous Neville Rose, held in a detention centre as she plots to escape, free her fellow detainees, and return to the Tribe in the Firstwood. The plot draws from historical and contemporary parallels in Australia, yet part of the text’s subversive power is that these parallels and connections are never made explicit on the page. The reader is invited to become an active participant in coding meaning by applying their own understandings of the context and connections, creating an inter-subjective dialogue between reader and text, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowing. This article looks to the first novel in the trilogy as the key exemplifier of the disruption of genre and knowledge through the representation of time. It is in this novel that these concepts are established and realised most clearly, being predominantly from Ashala’s perspective as a direct descendant of Indigenous Australians, with the following two novels divided between Ashala, Georgie, and Ember as polyphonic narrative focalisers. Acting as an introduction to the series, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf presents a foundation for readers to challenge their perceptions on both genre and knowledge. Kwaymullina entangles the two, imbuing knowledge throughout narrative and structure which in turn disrupts genre. In her revisioning of narrative through genre and structural focus of time as a non-linear concept, Kwaymullina puts into practice Conrad Scott’s argument that “the potential healing of moments or processes of crisis in Indigenous dystopias is never possible without a strategic engagement with narrative itself, and even the formal aspects of the text” (73).While the series fits the conventions of the dystopian genre, it has been more commonly identified as speculative fiction, or Indigenous futurism, as Kwaymullina herself defines her work. James notes the significance of acknowledging a text as Indigenous futurism, writing, “identifying a work as Indigenous futurism rather than simply as YA dystopia asks readers, critics, and scholars to adjust their orientation in ways that may radically alter both their perception and reception of it” (153). For the purposes of this article, I acknowledge the clear value and importance of identifying the text as Indigenous futurism, but also find value in the movements that define the shift from dystopian literature to Indigenous futurism, in its engagement with and recasting of dystopian conventions in the text. In embedding Indigenous Knowledge in her worldbuilding and narrative, Kwaymullina actively rewrites dystopian expectations and tropes. These notions would be expected or normalised when grounded in Indigenous futurism, but are regarded as a subversion and revision when read in dystopian fiction. The text engages directly with the specific tropes and expectations of dystopian genre—its significance in rewriting the spaces, narratives, and structures of the genre cannot be overstated. The employment of the dystopian genre as both framework and space of revision speaks to larger debates of the value of dystopian fiction in examining socio-cultural issues over other genres such as realism. Critics argue the speculative nature of dystopian fiction that remains linked to concerns of the present and past allows audiences to envision and experience their own transformative experience, effecting political change (Kennon; Mallan; Basu, Broad, and Hintz; Sypnowich). Balaka Basu, Katherine Broad, and Carrie Hintz argue that serious issues presented in fantastic futuristic scenarios “may provide young people with an entry point into real-world problems, encouraging them to think about social and political issues in new ways, or even for the first time” (4-5). Kerry Mallan notes the “ability of dystopian fiction to open up to readers a dystopian social elsewhere serves a double function: On the one hand, it offers readers an opportunity to reflect on their current existence to compare the similarities and differences between the real and the fictional; on the other, these stories implicitly exhort young people to take responsibility for their own lives and the future of society” (16). Drawing on these metanarrative structures with the interweaving of Indigenous knowledge increases the active responsibility for the reader. It invokes Nnedi Okorafor’s labelling of Indigenous Futurisms as “the most truthful way of telling the truth” (279), creating opportunities for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous reader to engage with narratives of a real apocalypse on invaded land. The dystopian setting and expectations form a buffer between reader and text (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 4), making the narrative more accessible to the reader without shying away from the embedded trauma, while drawing on dystopian fiction’s balance of despair and optimism (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 2).The stakes and value of dystopian fiction are heightened when engaging with Indigenous narratives and knowledge; as Claire Coleman (a Noongar woman from the south coast of Western Australia) notes, Indigenous Australians live in a post-apocalyptic state as “all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive today are the descendants of people who survived an apocalypse” (n.p.). James, quoting Uppinder Mehan, concurs, writing “these narrators are ‘survivors—or the descendants of survivors’ [162], not just of broken dystopian worlds or post-cataclysmic events but of the real historical legacies of slavery, conquest, and oppression” (157). Writing on Indigenous futurisms in dystopian and utopian fiction, Mary Morrison argues “people outside Western hegemonic power structures would likely be well-placed to transform the utopian imagination, to decolonize it” (11), acknowledging the significance in the intersection of genre and lived experience by author and character.Kwaymullina expands on this, noting that for Indigenous authors the tropes of speculative fiction are familiar lived experiences. She writes thatmany of the ideas that populate speculative-fiction books – notions of time travel, astral projection, speaking the languages of animals or trees – are part of Indigenous cultures. One of the aspects of my own novels that is regularly interpreted as being pure fantasy, that of an ancient creation spirit who sung the world into being, is for me simply part of my reality. (“Edges” 27)Kwaymullina affirms Coleman and James in her approach, writing “Indigenous people lived through the end of the world, but we did not end. We survived by holding on to our cultures, our kin, and our sense of what was right in a world gone terribly wrong” (“Edges” 29). The Tribe series demonstrates survivance, with Kwaymullina’s approach forming possibilities for intersubjective dialogues across genre. The concept is reinforced through Ashala’s repeated, joyful cries of hope throughout the text: “I live! We live! We survive!” (197, 200, 279, 391).Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz note dystopian literature considers possible futures from the outlook and failures of the present (8), arguing “the label ‘dystopia’ typically applies to works that simultaneously imagine futures and consider the present, essentially occupying a liminal space between these times” (Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz 9). This sense of liminality is heightened with the engagement of time from an Indigenous perspective; as Scott writes, “Indigenous dystopian fiction presents not only the crisis of the future but the ongoing crisis of the present time, and that which is still resonant from the past” (73). In “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow”, Kwaymullina notes that linear time can “become a tool of ideology, with colonial characterisations of Indigenous peoples as being of an earlier (less ‘advanced’) time through the use of terms such as ‘primitive’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘prehistory’” (“Respect” 126).In shifting to a dystopian world where Australia as a colonised or invaded country is no longer recognised, but Country is still alive and read by those who live on it, Kwaymullina recasts the use of linear time as a tool of ideology to reaffirm Coleman’s argument that Indigenous Australians already exist in a post-apocalyptic state. She draws from the past and present and casts it into the future, while simultaneously recognising that all three are linked and circular—events are repeating and being relived. Kwaymullina depicts numerous parallels between the dystopian world and a post-invasion Australia, populating her world with references to detention centres; othering and distinct labelling of a vilified minority deemed a threat or aberrant to the majority colonising community; the name and title of the series’ central villain Chief Administrator Neville Rose in a clear reference to A.O. Neville, WA Chief Protector of Aborigines.At the outset, the government uses labels to separate and denigrate the Other—individuals with Abilities are called Illegals, distinct from Citizens, although they can apply for Exemptions if their Ability is deemed useful and passive. The terminology of Exemption draws deliberate connections to the Exemption Certificate Indigenous Australians could apply for from the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1943. The text consistently operates in modes of survivance, as Ashala and the Tribe redefine their world through a distinctly Indigenous perspective (Murphy 179). Ashala gains power through the tool used to suppress her by claiming and embracing this status, identifying her friends and herself as the Tribe and choosing a forest name emblematic of the totems that each Tribe member has a particular connection to (e.g. Georgie Spider, Ember Crow, Ashala Wolf). Continual parallels are drawn to Indigenous Knowledge: Ashala’s Ability is Sleepwalking, where she enters a state in dreaming where she can alter reality, a liminal space that suggests connections to the Dreamtime. While the land is no longer called or recognised as Australia, and the tectonic plates have shifted land mass, it remains Country, as recognised in Ashala’s relationship with the Firstwood. The Balance, the inherent harmony between all life, animate and inanimate, is a clear reflection of an Indigenous understanding, positioning it as the mainstream ideology.Kwaymullina weaves Indigenous knowledge through the text as demonstrated through narrative, key thematic concepts, and structure, disrupting the tropes of dystopian fiction in a manner that subverts genre and presents new possibilities for both reader and writer while presenting a shift to Indigenous Futurisms. As an organic by-product of this ideological framework, regressive or gendered tropes are re-envisioned as feminist and ecologically centred, ultimately conveying a sense of hope and survivance. Key tropes of YA dystopian fiction include a female teenager protagonist oppressed by her government, often initially unknowingly so embedded is she in the system, potentially profiting from it in some way. She is often introduced to the reader in a setting that the character initially reads as utopian, but is revealed to be dystopian and authoritarian in its construction. As identified by Ann M.M. Childs, a common dynamic in the genre that reinforces gender roles in heterosexual relationships see the protagonist introduced to the concept of rebellion or dissent through a male love interest already embedded in a resistance movement, at the cost of losing or betraying a female friend (188). Childs notes the protagonist may be resistant to the idea of rebellion, but after falling for the love interest, grows to genuinely care for the cause. Technology is depicted as advanced, alien or dehumanising, and both belongs to and represents the repressive society the protagonist seeks to escape and change. The natural environment is depicted in binary opposition, with characters finding resilience, freedom, and personal agency in a return to nature (McDonough and Wagner 157). Society will have attempted to restrict, destroy, or otherwise mine the natural world, but this attempt for control will inevitably fail or backfire. Initially the environment is displayed as a potentially antagonistic element, wild and dangerous; however, after the character escapes their confining world, it becomes an ally. In her employment of a perspective framed by Indigenous Knowledge, Kwaymullina subverts each of these established tropes, offering an alternative reading of conventions often embedded in the genre. Ashala is introduced as already entrenched in a rebellion that she is both leader and pivotal figure of. Inverting the dynamic outlined by Childs, she is love interest Connor’s motivation for rejecting the government and joining the Tribe: “You are the reason I came here, Ashala Wolf” (Kwaymullina 263). Kwaymullina dismisses Childs’ concern over the removal of female friendship in favour of heterosexual romance by centering Ashala’s relationships with Georgie and Ember as fundamental to Ashala’s well-being, where sistahood is a key paradigm of hope: “I carry my friends with me” (Kwaymullina 39). For Ashala and the Tribe, nature as exemplified through the Firstwood is Country, not only sanctuary but an animate being that Ashala speaks with, asks permission to live within, and offers protection and apology for the harm down to it by humans in the past. The privileging of environment, and reading all animate or inanimate beings as living, extends to challenging the nature/technology dichotomy. Even the static or sterile environments of the detention centres are recognised for their connection to nature in their construction from recycled materials: “Nothing ever truly ends, only transforms” (Kwaymullina 141). In “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality”, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Blaze Kwaymullina write thatsince everything must interconnect and interrelate to survive, if a pattern is fixed in time, it loses its ability to dynamically connect with other patterns. To be temporally fixed is therefore to be isolated; frozen. In an Indigenous worldview, it is, in fact, an impossibility – for that which cannot move, cannot interact, and that which cannot interact is inanimate. And there is nothing inanimate in country. (200)This can be read as representative of Kwaymullina’s rupture or revision of dystopian tropes and genre. When tropes are read as static or absolute, they run the risk of freezing or limiting the knowledge encoded in these stories. By integrating Indigenous Knowledge, new patterns can emerge and interact, extending to the reader’s own understanding of genre, time, and epistemology. Kwaymullina’s revisioning of dystopian tropes through an embedded and celebrated Indigenous perspective culminates in the successful thematic, narrative, and structural expression of time as a non-linear concept. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina acknowledge the division between the reductionist and linear perspective of time through a Western worldview in comparison to the non-linear perception from that of an Indigenous Australian worldview. They acknowledge that their expression of time is not to be read as representative of all Indigenous Australians’ perspective of time, but one informed by their own Country and upbringing. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina write,in an Aboriginal worldview, time—to the extent that it exists at all—is neither linear nor absolute. There are patterns and systems of energy that create and transform, from the ageing process of the human body to the growth and decay of the broader universe. But these processes are not ‘measured’ or even framed in a strictly temporal sense, and certainly not in a linear sense. (199)This is enacted through the narrative structure of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. The text is set across four days, yet spans years, shifting through narrative in a non-linear manner and reflecting the Indigenous understanding of time as a circular, evolving concept. These four days act as the containers for the text, as Kwaymullina distinguishes the departure from linear time for the uninitiated reader by including headings and subheadings in chapter titles, marked as “Day One”, “Day Two”, “Day Three”, and “Day Four”, before the final section, “The Escape”. Within these containers, themselves marked linearly, narrative ebbs and flows across time and space, taking Ashala away from the Detention Centre to different moments from her past, spanning years. These ‘flashbacks’ are not presented in a linear fashion; the text revisits and repeats key moments of Ashala’s life out of sequence, providing an immediate focus on these seemingly past moments. This is key in shaping the reader’s understanding of “the patterns and systems of energy that create and transform” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 199)—as Ashala revisits or rediscovers memory through time, perceptions of character, motive, relationships, and key plot points are changed and transformed. Meaning is formed through this relationship of narrative and time in a manner not possible through a linear structure. Over the course of the novel, Ashala and the reader find she’s chosen to give herself false memories to protect the Tribe and complete a master plan to defeat Neville Rose. As such, as the novel begins the reader, aligned with Ashala as narrative focaliser, is positioned to read key points through a flawed perspective. Connor is presented as an enemy and betrayer of the Tribe, while Ashala denies her feelings towards him. The reader is aligned with Ashala’s perspective—she has already fallen in love with Connor, but neither she nor the reader knows it due to the displacement of knowledge through narrative structure and memory. This also speaks to identity formation in the text—Ashala is herself, and not herself until the novel reaches full circle, and she and the reader have experienced multiple points of time. As Ember explains, “it’s not about losing small pieces of information. This stuff shapes your entire understanding of reality” (Kwaymullina 167). If the reader revisits the text with this knowledge, they find further value in exploring the non-linear, circular narrative, finding subtext in characters’ interactions and decisions. The disruption in the non-linear narrative structure is twofold: to reflect the representation of time in an Indigenous epistemology, further rewriting the genre; and to create an intersubjective dialogue. As such, the narrative structure creates a space of invitation to the reader. Rather than positioning Ashala as embedded and aware of her status as a custodian of Indigenous knowledge, the text places her as ingrained in Indigenous epistemology, but unaware of it. In this way, the text effectively invites the reader in, mirroring Ashala’s journey of (re)discovery. The non-Indigenous reader enters the text alongside Ashala, with Indigenous knowledge embedded subtly throughout the text echoed in Kwaymullina’s engagement with dystopian tropes, and integrated Indigenous epistemology. By the time Ashala meets the Serpent, her Grandfather, and has her ancestry explained to her, the reader has already been immersed in Ashala’s own way of thinking, an inherently Indigenous one; for instance, throughout the text, she acknowledges the value and interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. The text leaves space for the reader to be active in their own construction of meaning and knowledge by never using the terms “Indigenous” or “Aboriginal”, themselves colonial inventions employed to control and label. Instead, the reader is encouraged to engage in the metatextual intersubjective dialogue introduced by Kwaymullina to acknowledge Indigenous epistemology—but by way of her approach, Kwaymullina further encourages the reader to “forget Aborigines” (Healy 219) by centring knowledge in its own right, rather than in direct opposition to Western epistemologies. That is, Kwaymullina disrupts Western perspectives framing of Indigenous knowledge as “other”, altering expectations of the norm as non-Indigenous. As Kwaymullina writes, to conceive of time in a non-linear way is at once a great gift and a great responsibility. The responsibility is that our individual actions matter powerfully, radiating out across relationships and affecting all that might be thought of in a linear sense as past, present and future. But the gift is that the passage of linear time has never moved us so far that we cannot take meaningful action to heal the wounds of colonialism. (“Respect” 126-127)In The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Kwaymullina realises this gift and responsibility. By framing structural, conceptual, and narrative time through an Indigenous epistemology, Kwaymullina privileges Indigenous Knowledge and effectively subverts and revises the genre through the rupture of dystopian conventions. Possibilities of hope and healing emerge in the text’s construction of time and genre as spaces of growth and change are emphasised; like Ashala, the reader finds themselves at the end and beginning of the world at once.ReferencesBasu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York: Routledge, 2013. Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1994. Bradford, Clare, et al. New World Orders in Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Childs, Ann M.M. “The Incompatibility of Female Friendships and Rebellion.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 187-201.Coleman, Claire G. “Apocalypses Are More than the Stuff of Fiction — First Nations Australians Survived One.” ABC News 8 Dec. 2017. 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/first-nations-australians-survived-an-apocalypse-says-author/9224026>.Day, Sara K., Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Green-Barteet, Miranda A., and Meghan Gilbert-Hickey. “Black and Brown Boys in Young Adult Dystopias: Racialized Docility in ‘The Hunger Games Trilogy’ and ‘The Lunar Chronicles Feather Journal.’” Red Feather Journal 8.2 (2017). 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.redfeatherjournal.org/volume-8-issue-2.html>.Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004. Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2008.Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostry, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003.James, Lynette. “Children of Change, Not Doom: Indigenous Futurist Heroines in YA.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.9>.Kennon, Patricia. “‘Belonging’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children.” Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 15.2 (2005). 28 Sep. 2019 <http://www.paperschildlit.com/pdfs/Papers_2005_v15no2_p40.pdf>.Kwaymullina, Ambelin. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Newtown: Walker Books Australia, 2012.———. “Edges, Centres and Futures: Reflections on Being an Indigenous Speculative-Fiction Writer.” Kill Your Darlings 18 (2014): 22-33.———. “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow.” Westerly 64.1 (2019): 121-134. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies 34.2 (2010). 21 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14443051003721189>.Mallan, Kerry. “Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 37.1 (2017). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2017.1250586>.McDonough, Megan, and Katherine A. Wagner. “Rebellious Natures: The Role of Nature in Young Adult Dystopian Female Protagonists’ Awakenings and Agency.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 157-170.Montz, Amy L. “Rebels in Dresses: Distractions of Competitive Girlhood in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 107-121.Morrison, Mary. “Decolonizing Utopia: Indigenous Knowledge and Dystopian Speculative Fiction.” Dissertation. U of California, 2017.Murphy, Graham J. “For Love of Country: Apocalyptic Survivance in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe Series.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.10>.Okorafor, Nnedi. “Organic Fantasy.” African Identities 7.2 (2009). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808967>.Scott, Conrad. “(Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy: Healing Immanent Crisis in the Dystopias of Eden Robinson and Richard Van Camp.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.6>.Sypnowich, Christine. “Lessons from Dystopia: Critique, Hope and Political Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 52.4 (2018). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12328>.

In 2013, the Capricornia Arts Mob (CAM), an Indigenous collective of artists situated in Rockhampton, central Queensland, Australia, successfully tendered for one of three public art projects that were grouped under the title Flood Markers (Roberts; Roberts and Mackay; Robinson and Mackay). Commissioned as part of the Queensland Government's Community Development and Engagement Initiative, Flood Markers aims to increase awareness of Rockhampton’s history, with particular focus on the Fitzroy River and the phenomena of flooding. Honouring Land Connections is CAM’s contribution to the project and consists of several “memory poles” that stand alongside the Fitzroy River in Toonooba Park. Rockhampton lies on Dharumbal Country with Toonooba being the Dharumbal name for the Fitzroy River and the inspiration for the work due to its cultural significance to the Aboriginal people of that region. The name Toonooba, as well as other images and icons including boomerangs, spears, nets, water lily, and frogs, amongst others, are carved, burnt, painted and embedded into the large ironbark poles. These stand with the river on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton on the other (see fig. 1, 2 and 3).Figure 1 Figure 2Figure 3Within this article, we discuss Honouring Land Connections as having two main functions which contribute to its significance as Indigenous cultural expression and identity affirmation. Firstly, the memory poles (as well as the process of sourcing materials and producing the final product) are a manifestation of Country and a representation of its stories and lived memories. Honouring Land Connections provides a means for Aboriginal people to revel in Country and maintain connections to a vital component of their being as Indigenous. Secondly, by revealing Indigenous stories, experiences, and memories, Honouring Land Connections emphasises Indigenous voices and perspectives within a place dominated by Eurocentric outlooks and knowledges. Toonooba provides the backdrop on which the complexities of cultural and identity formation within settler-colonial spaces are highlighted whilst revelling in continuous Indigenous presence.Flood Markers as ArtArtists throughout the world have used flood markers as a means of visual expression through which to explore and reveal local histories, events, environments, and socio-cultural understandings of the relationships between persons, places, and the phenomena of flooding. Geertz describes art as a social text embedded within wider socio-cultural systems; providing insight into cultural, social, political, economic, gendered, religious, ethnic, environmental, and biographical contexts. Flood markers are not merely metric tools used for measuring the height of a river, but rather serve as culture artefacts or indexes (Gell Art and Agency; Gell "Technology of Enchantment") that are products and producers of socio-culture contexts and the memories and experiences embedded within them. Through different methods, mediums, and images, artists have created experiential and intellectual spaces where those who encounter their work are encouraged to engage their surroundings in thought provoking and often-new ways.In some cases, flood markers have brought attention to the “character and natural history” of a particular place, where artists such as Louise Lavarack have sought to provoke consciousness of the movement of water across flood plains (Lavarack). In other works, flood markers have served as memorials to individuals such as Gilbert White whose daughter honoured his life and research through installing a glass spire at Boulder Creek, Colorado in 2011 (White). Tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 have also been commemorated through flood markers. Artist Christopher Saucedo carved 1,836 waves into a freestanding granite block; each wave representing a life lost (University of New Orleans). The weight of the granite symbolises the endurance and resilience of those who faced, and will continue to face, similar forces of nature. The Pillar of Courage erected in 2011 in Ipswich, Queensland, similarly contains the words “resilience, community, strength, heroes, caring and unity” with each word printed on six separate sections of the pillar, representing the six major floods that have hit the region (Chudleigh).Whilst these flood markers provide valuable insights into local histories, specific to each environmental and socio-cultural context, works such as the Pillar of Courage fail to address Indigenous relationships to Country. By framing flooding as a “natural disaster” to be overcome, rather than an expression of Country to be listened to and understood, Euro and human-centric perspectives are prioritised over Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Indigenous knowledges however encourages a reorientation of Eurocentric responses and relationships to Country, and in doing so challenge compartmentalised views of “nature” where flooding is separated from land and Country (Ingold Perception; Seton and Bradley; Singer). Honouring Land Connections symbolises the voice and eternal presence of Toonooba and counters presentations of flooding that depict it as historian Heather Goodall (36) once saw “as unusual events of disorder in which the river leaves its proper place with catastrophic results.”Country To understand flooding from Indigenous perspectives it is first necessary to discuss Country and apprehend what it means for Indigenous peoples. Country refers to the physical, cosmological, geographical, relational, and emotional setting upon which Indigenous identities and connections to place and kin are embedded. Far from a passive geographic location upon which interactions take place, Country is an active and responsive agent that shapes and contextualises social interactions between and amongst all living beings. Bob Morgan writes of how “Country is more than issues of land and geography; it is about spirituality and identity, knowing who we are and who we are connected to; and it helps us understand how all living things are connected.” Country is also an epistemological frame that is filled with knowledge that may be known and familiarised whilst being knowledge itself (Langton "Sacred"; Rose Dingo; Yunupingu).Central to understanding Country is the fact that it refers to a living being’s spiritual homeland which is the ontological place where relationships are formed and maintained (Yunupingu). As Country nurtures and provides the necessities for survival and prosperity, Indigenous people (but also non-Indigenous populations) have moral obligations to care for Country as kin (Rose Nourishing Terrains). Country is epistemic, relational, and ontological and refers to both physical locations as well as modes of “being” (Heidegger), meaning it is carried from place to place as an embodiment within a person’s consciousness. Sally Morgan (263) describes how “our country is alive, and no matter where we go, our country never leaves us.” Country therefore is fluid and mobile for it is ontologically inseparable to one’s personhood, reflected through phrases such as “I am country” (B. Morgan 204).Country is in continuous dialogue with its surroundings and provides the setting upon which human and non-human beings; topographical features such as mountains and rivers; ancestral beings and spirits such as the Rainbow Snake; and ecological phenomena such as winds, tides, and floods, interact and mutually inform each other’s existence (Rose Nourishing Terrains). For Aboriginal people, understanding Country requires “deep listening” (Atkinson; Ungunmerr), a responsive awareness that moves beyond monological and human-centric understandings of the world and calls for deeper understandings of the mutual and co-dependant relationships that exist within it. The awareness of such mutuality has been discussed through terms such as “kincentrism” (Salmón), “meshworks” (Ingold Lines), “webs of connection” (Hokari), “nesting” (Malpas), and “native science” (Cajete). Such concepts are ways of theorising “place” as relational, physical, and mental locations made up of numerous smaller interactions, each of which contribute to the identity and meaning of place. Whilst each individual agent or object retains its own autonomy, such autonomy is dependent on its wider relation to others, meaning that place is a location where “objectivity, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity converge” (Malpas 35) and where the very essence of place is revealed.Flooding as DialogueWhen positioned within Indigenous frameworks, flooding is both an agent and expression of Toonooba and Country. For the phenomenon to occur however, numerous elements come into play such as the fall of rain; the layout of the surrounding terrain; human interference through built weirs and dams; and the actions and intervention of ancestral beings and spirits. Furthermore, flooding has a direct impact on Country and all life within it. This is highlighted by Dharumbal Elder Uncle Billy Mann (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann") who speaks of the importance of flooding in bringing water to inland lagoons which provide food sources for Dharumbal people, especially at times when the water in Toonooba is low. Such lagoons remain important places for fishing, hunting, recreational activities, and cultural practices but are reliant on the flow of water caused by the flowing, and at times flooding river, which Uncle Mann describes as the “lifeblood” of Dharumbal people and Country (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann"). Through her research in the Murray-Darling region of New South Wales, Weir writes of how flooding sustains life though cycles that contribute to ecological balance, providing nourishment and food sources for all beings (see also Cullen and Cullen 98). Water’s movement across land provokes the movement of animals such as mice and lizards, providing food for snakes. Frogs emerge from dry clay plains, finding newly made waterholes. Small aquatic organisms flourish and provide food sources for birds. Golden and silver perch spawn, and receding waters promote germination and growth. Aboriginal artist Ron Hurley depicts a similar cycle in a screen-print titled Waterlily–Darambal Totem. In this work Hurley shows floodwaters washing away old water lily roots that have been cooked in ant bed ovens as part of Dharumbal ceremonies (UQ Anthropology Museum). The cooking of the water lily exposes new seeds, which rains carry to nearby creeks and lagoons. The seeds take root and provide food sources for the following year. Cooking water lily during Dharumbal ceremonies contributes to securing and maintaining a sustainable food source as well as being part of Dharumbal cultural practice. Culture, ecological management, and everyday activity are mutually connected, along with being revealed and revelled in. Aboriginal Elder and ranger Uncle Fred Conway explains how Country teaches Aboriginal people to live in balance with their surroundings (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). As Country is in constant communication, numerous signifiers can be observed on land and waterscapes, indicating the most productive and sustainable time to pursue certain actions, source particular foods, or move to particular locations. The best time for fishing in central Queensland for example is when Wattles are in bloom, indicating a time when fish are “fatter and sweeter” (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). In this case, the Wattle is 1) autonomous, having its own life cycle; 2) mutually dependant, coming into being because of seasonal weather patterns; and 3) an agent of Country that teaches those with awareness how to respond and benefit from its lessons.Dialogue with Country As Country is sentient and responsive, it is vital that a person remains contextually aware of their actions on and towards their surroundings. Indigenous peoples seek familiarity with Country but also ensure that they themselves are known and familiarised by it (Rose Dingo). In a practice likened to “baptism”, Langton ("Earth") describes how Aboriginal Elders in Cape York pour water over the head of newcomers as a way of introducing them to Country, and ensuring that Country knows those who walk upon it. These introductions are done out of respect for Country and are a way of protecting outsiders from the potentially harmful powers of ancestral beings. Toussaint et al. similarly note how during mortuary rites, parents of the deceased take water from rivers and spit it back into the land, symbolising the spirit’s return to Country.Dharumbal man Robin Hatfield demonstrates the importance of not interfering with the dialogue of Country through recalling being told as a child not to disturb Barraru or green frogs. Memmott (78) writes that frogs share a relationship with the rain and flooding caused by Munda-gadda, the Rainbow Snake. Uncle Dougie Hatfield explains the significance of Munda-gadda to his Country stating how “our Aboriginal culture tells us that all the waterways, lagoons, creeks, rivers etc. and many landforms were created by and still are protected by the Moonda-Ngutta, what white people call the Rainbow Snake” (Memmott 79).In the case of Robin Hatfield, to interfere with Barraru’s “business” is to threaten its dialogue with Munda-gadda and in turn the dialogue of Country in form of rain. In addition to disrupting the relational balance between the frog and Munda-gadda, such actions potentially have far-reaching social and cosmological consequences. The rain’s disruption affects the flood plains, which has direct consequences for local flora and transportation and germination of water lily seeds; fauna, affecting the spawning of fish and their movement into lagoons; and ancestral beings such as Munda-gadda who continue to reside within Toonooba.Honouring Land Connections provided artists with a means to enter their own dialogue with Country and explore, discuss, engage, negotiate, and affirm aspects of their indigeneity. The artists wanted the artwork to remain organic to demonstrate honour and respect for Dharumbal connections with Country (Roberts). This meant that materials were sourced from the surrounding Country and the poles placed in a wave-like pattern resembling Munda-gadda. Alongside the designs and symbols painted and carved into the poles, fish skins, birds, nests, and frogs are embalmed within cavities that are cut into the wood, acting as windows that allow viewers to witness components of Country that are often overlooked (see fig. 4). Country therefore is an equal participant within the artwork’s creation and continuing memories and stories. More than a representation of Country, Honouring Land Connections is a literal manifestation of it.Figure 4Opening Dialogue with Non-Indigenous AustraliaHonouring Land Connections is an artistic and cultural expression that revels in Indigenous understandings of place. The installation however remains positioned within a contested “hybrid” setting that is informed by both Indigenous and settler-colonial outlooks (Bhabha). The installation for example is separated from the other two artworks of Flood Markers that explore Rockhampton’s colonial and industrial history. Whilst these are positioned within a landscaped area, Honouring Land Connections is placed where the grass is dying, seating is lacking, and is situated next to a dilapidated coast guard building. It is a location that is as quickly left behind as it is encountered. Its separation from the other two works is further emphasised through its depiction in the project brief as a representation of Rockhampton’s pre-colonial history. Presenting it in such a way has the effect of bookending Aboriginal culture in relation to European settlement, suggesting that its themes belong to a time past rather than an immediate present. Almost as if it is a revelation in and of itself. Within settler-colonial settings, place is heavily politicised and often contested. In what can be seen as an ongoing form of colonialism, Eurocentric epistemologies and understandings of place continue to dominate public thought, rhetoric, and action in ways that legitimise White positionality whilst questioning and/or subjugating other ways of knowing, being, and doing (K. Martin; Moreton-Robinson; Wolfe). This turns places such as Toonooba into agonistic locations of contrasting and competing interests (Bradfield). For many Aboriginal peoples, the memories and emotions attached to a particular place can render it as either comfortable and culturally safe, or as unsafe, unsuitable, unwelcoming, and exclusionary (Fredericks). Honouring Land Connections is one way of publicly asserting and recognising Toonooba as a culturally safe, welcoming, and deeply meaningful place for Indigenous peoples. Whilst the themes explored in Honouring Land Connections are not overtly political, its presence on colonised/invaded land unsettles Eurocentric falsities and colonial amnesia (B. Martin) of an uncontested place and history in which Indigenous voices and knowledges are silenced. The artwork is a physical reminder that encourages awareness—particularly for non-Indigenous populations—of Indigenous voices that are continuously demanding recognition of Aboriginal place within Country. Similar to the boomerangs carved into the poles representing flooding as a natural expression of Country that will return (see fig. 5), Indigenous peoples continue to demand that the wider non-Indigenous population acknowledge, respect, and morally responded to Aboriginal cultures and knowledges.Figure 5Conclusion Far from a historic account of the past, the artists of CAM have created an artwork that promotes awareness of an immediate and emerging Indigenous presence on Country. It creates a space that is welcoming to Indigenous people, allowing them to engage with and affirm aspects of their living histories and cultural identities. Through sharing stories and providing “windows” into Aboriginal culture, Country, and lived experiences (which like the frogs of Toonooba are so often overlooked), the memory poles invite and welcome an open dialogue with non-Indigenous Australians where all may consider their shared presence and mutual dependence on each other and their surroundings.The memory poles are mediatory agents that stand on Country, revealing and bearing witness to the survival, resistance, tenacity, and continuity of Aboriginal peoples within the Rockhampton region and along Toonooba. Honouring Land Connections is not simply a means of reclaiming the river as an Indigenous space, for reclamation signifies something regained after it has been lost. What the memory poles signify is something eternally present, i.e. Toonooba is and forever will be embedded in Aboriginal Country in which we all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and non-human, share. The memory poles serve as lasting reminders of whose Country Rockhampton is on and describes the life ways of that Country, including times of flood. Through celebrating and revelling in the presence of Country, the artists of CAM are revealing the deep connection they have to Country to the wider non-Indigenous community.ReferencesAtkinson, Judy. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Spinifex Press, 2002.Bhabha, Homi, K. The Location of Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2012.Bradfield, Abraham. "Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia." Religions 10.8 (2019): 469.Cajete, Gregory. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. 1st ed. 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“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we created Burning, a workshop and performance series that investigated cell imagery, cancer imagery, environmental sensitivity and healing journeys through ritual-based happenings infused with poetry, dramatic scenes, Butoh and Contact Improvisation dances, and live drawing (see: http://www.olimpias.org/).Performance sites included the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, July and October 2009, the Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Eugene, Oregon, May 2009, and Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington State, August 2009. Participants for each installation varied, but always included a good percentage of disabled artists.(see fig. 2).Figure 2. Image: Linda Townsend. Performers: Participants in the Burning project. “Burning Action on the Beach”. Burning. 2009. In the last part of these evening-long performance happenings, we use meditation techniques to shift the space and time of participants. We invite people to lie down or otherwise become comfortable (or to observe in quiet). I then begin to lead the part of the evening that most closely dovetails with my personal research exploration. With a slow and reaching voice, I ask people to breathe, to become aware of the movement of breath through their bodies, and of the hollows filled by the luxuriating breath. Once participants are deeply relaxed, I take them on journeys which activate bodily fantasies. I ask them to breathe in colored lights (and leave the specific nature of the colors to them). I invite participants to become cell bodies—heart cells, liver cells, skin cells—and to explore the properties and sensations of these cell environments, through both internal and external movement. “What is the surface, what is deep inside, what does the granular space of the cell feel like? How does the cell membrane move?” When deeply involved in these explorations, I move through the room and give people individual encounters by whispering to them, one by one—letting them respond bodily to the idea that their cell encounters alchemical elements like gold and silver, lead or mercury, or other deeply culturally laden substances like oil or blood. When I am finished with my individual instruction to each participant, all around me, people are moving gently, undulating, contracting and expanding, their eyes closed and their face full of concentration and openness. Some have dropped out of the meditation and are sitting quietly against a wall, observing what is going on around them. Some move more than others, some whisper quietly to themselves.When people are back in spoken-language-time, in sitting-upright-time, we all talk about the experiences, and about the cultural body knowledges, half-forgotten healing practices, that seem to emerge like Jungian archetypes in these movement journeys. During the meditative/slow movement sequence, some long-standing Olimpias performers in the room had imagined themselves as cancer cells, and gently moved with the physical imagery this brought to them. In my meditation invitations during the participatory performance, I do not invite community participants to move as cancer cells—it seems to me to require a more careful approach, a longer developmental period, to enter this darkly signified state, even though Olimpias performers do by no means all move tragically, darkly, or despairing when entering “cancer movement.” In workshops in the weeks leading up to the participatory performances, Olimpias collaborators entered these experiences of cell movement, different organ parts, and cancerous movement many times, and had time to debrief and reflect on their experiences.After the immersion exercise of cell movement, we ask people how it felt like to lie and move in a space that also held cancer cells, and if they noticed different movement patterns, different imaginaries of cell movement, around them, and how that felt. This leads to rich discussions, testimonies of poetic embodiment, snippets of disclosures, glimpses of personal stories, but the echo of embodiment seems to keep the full, long stories at bay, and outside of the immediacy of our sharing. As I look around myself while listening, I see some hands intertwined, some gentle touches, as people rock in the memory of their meditations.nowyour light shines very brightlybut I want youto knowyour darkness alsorichand beyond fear (Lorde 87)My research aim with these movement meditation sequences is not to find essential truths about human bodily imagination, but to explore the limits of somatic experience and cultural expression, to make artful life experiential and to hence create new tools for living in the chemically saturated world we all inhabit.I need to add here that these are my personal aims for Burning—all associated artists have their own journey, their own reasons for being involved, and there is no necessary consensus—just a shared interest in transformation, the cultural images of disease, disability and addiction, the effects of invasion and touch in our lives, and how embodied poetry can help us live. (see fig. 3). For example, a number of collaborators worked together in the participatory Burning performances at the Subterranean Arthouse, a small Butoh performance space in Berkeley, located in an old shop, complete with an open membrane into the urban space—a shop-window and glass door. Lots of things happen with and through us during these evenings, not just my movement meditations.One of my colleagues, Sadie Wilcox, sets up live drawing scenarios, sketching the space between people. Another artist, Harold Burns, engages participants in contact dance, and invites a crossing of boundaries in and through presence. Neil Marcus invites people to move with him, gently, and blindfolded, and to feel his spastic embodiment and his facility with tender touch. Amber diPietra’s poem about cell movement and the journeys from one to another sounds out in the space, set to music by Mindy Dillard. What I am writing about here is my personal account of the actions I engage in, one facet of these evenings—choreographing participants’ inner experiences.Figure 3. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performers: Artists in the Burning project. “water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. My desires echo Lorde’s poem: “I want you”—there’s a sensual desire in me when I set up these movement meditation scenes, a delight in an erotic language and voice touch that is not predicated on sexual contact, but on intimacy, and on the borderlines, the membranes of the ear and the skin; ‘to know’—I continue to be intrigued and obsessed, as an artist and as a critic, by the way people envision what goes on inside them, and find agency, poetic lift, in mobilising these knowledges, in reaching from the images of bodies to the life of bodies in the world. ‘your darkness also’—not just the bright light, no, but also the fears and the strengths that hide in the blood and muscle, in the living pulsing shadow of the heart muscle pumping away, in the dark purple lobe of the liver wrapping itself around my middle and purifying, detoxifying, sifting, whatever sweeps through this body.These meditative slow practices can destabilise people. Some report that they experience something quite real, quite deep, and that there is transformation to be gained in these dream journeys. But the framing within which the Burning workshops take place question immediately the “authentic” of this experiential disclosure. The shared, the cultural, the heritage and hidden knowledge of being encultured quickly complicate any essence. This is where the element of formal enframing enters into the immediacy of experience, and into the narration of a stable, autonomous “I.” Our deepest cellular experience, the sounds and movements we listen to when we are deeply relaxed, are still cultured, are still shared, come to us in genres and stable image complexes.This form of presentation also questions practices of self-disclosure that participate in trauma narratives through what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman has called “impression management” (208). Goffman researched the ways we play ourselves as roles in specific contexts, how we manage acts of disclosure and knowledge, how we deal with stigma and stereotype. Impression management refers to the ways people present themselves to others, using conscious or unconscious techniques to shape their image. In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation, performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a “natural,” unfiltered display of an “authentic” self, but a complex engagement with choices. The naming and claiming of bodily trauma can be part of the repertoire of self-representation, a (stock-)narrative that enables recognition and hence communication. The full traumatic narrative arc (injury, reaction, overcoming) can here be a way to manage the discomfort of others, to navigate potential stigma.In Burning, by-passing verbal self-disclosure and the recitation of experience, by encountering ourselves in dialogue with our insides and with foreign elements in this experiential way, there is less space for people to speak managed, filtered personal truths. I find that these truths tend to either close down communication if raw and direct, or become told as a story in its complete, polished arc. Either form leaves little space for dialogue. After each journey through bodies, cells, through liver and heart, breath and membrane, audience members need to unfold for themselves what they felt, and how that felt, and how that relates to the stories of cancer, environmental toxins and invasion that they know.It is not fair. We should be able to have dialogues about “I am poisoned, I live with environmental sensitivities, and they constrict my life,” “I survived cancer,” “I have multiple sclerosis,” “I am autistic,” “I am addicted to certain substances,” “I am injured by certain substances.” But tragedy tugs at these stories, puts their narrators into the realm of the inviolate, as a community quickly feel sorry for these persons, or else feels attacked by them, in particular if one does not know how to help. Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity. The cultural weight of these narratives hinders flow, become heavily stigmatised. Many contemporary writers on the subjects of cancer and personhood recognise the (not always negative) aspects of this stigma, and mobilise them in their narratives. As Marisa Acocella Marchetto in the Cancer-Vixen: A True Story puts it: ‘Play the cancer card!’ (107). The cancer card appears in this graphic novel memoir in the form of a full-page spoof advertisement, and the card is presented as a way to get out of unwanted social obligations. The cancer card is perfectly designed to create the communal cringe and the hasty retreat. If you have cancer, you are beyond the pale, and ordinary rules of behavior do no longer apply. People who experience these life-changing transformational diagnoses often know very well how isolating it can be to name one’s personal story, and many are very careful about how they manage disclosure, and know that if they choose to disclose, they have to manage other people’s discomfort. In Burning, stories of injury and hurt swing in the room with us, all of these stories are mentioned in our performance program, but none of them are specifically given individual voice in our performance (although some participants chose to come out in the sharing circle at the end of the event). No one owns the diagnoses, the identity of “survivor,” and the presence of these disease complexes are instead dispersed, performatively enacted and brought in experiential contact with all members of our temporary group. When you leave our round, you most likely still do not know who has multiple sclerosis, who has substance addiction issues, who is sensitive to environmental toxins.Communication demands territorialisation, and formal experimentation alone, unanchored in lived experience, easily alienates. So how can disclosure and the storytelling self find some lift, and yet some connection, too? How can the Burning cell imaginary become both deep, emotionally rich and formal, pointing to its constructed nature? That’s the question that each of the Olimpias’ community performance experiments begins with.How to Host a Past Collective: Setting Up a CirclePreceding Burning, one of our recent performance investigations was the Anarcha Project. In this multi-year, multi-site project, we revisited gynecological experiments performed on slave women in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s, by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology.” We did so not to revictimise historical women as suffering ciphers, or stand helpless at the site of historical injury. Instead, we used art-based methods to investigate the heritage of slavery medicine in contemporary health care inequalities and women’s health care. As part of the project, thousands of participants in multiple residencies across the U.S. shared their stories with the project leaders—myself, Aimee Meredith Cox, Carrie Sandahl, Anita Gonzalez and Tiye Giraud. We collected about two hundred of these fragments in the Anarcha Anti-Archive, a website that tries, frustratingly, to undo the logic of the ordered archive (Cox et al. n.p).The project closed in 2008, but I still give presentations with the material we generated. But what formal methods can I select, ethically and responsibly, to present the multivocal nature of the Anarcha Project, given that it is now just me in the conference room, given that the point of the project was the intersection of multiple stories, not the fetishisation of individual ones? In a number of recent presentations, I used a circle exercise to engage in fragmented, shrouded disclosure, to keep privacies safe, and to find material contact with one another. In these Anarcha rounds, we all take words into our mouths, and try to stay conscious to the nature of this act—taking something into our mouth, rather than acting out words, normalising them into spoken language. Take this into your mouth—transgression, sacrament, ritual, entrainment, from one body to another.So before an Anarcha presentation, I print out random pages from our Anarcha Anti-Archive. A number of the links in the website pull up material through chance procedures (a process implemented by Olimpias collaborator Jay Steichmann, who is interested in digital literacies). So whenever you click that particular link, you get to a different page in the anti-archive, and you can not retrace your step, or mark you place in an unfolding narrative. What comes up are poems, story fragments, images, all sent in in response to cyber Anarcha prompts. We sent these prompts during residencies to long-distance participants who could not physically be with us, and many people, from Wales to Malaysia, sent in responses. I pull up a good number of these pages, combined with some of the pages written by the core collaborators of our project. In the sharing that follows, I do not speak about the heart of the project, but I mark that I leave things unsaid. Here is what I do not say in the moment of the presentation—those medical experiments were gynecological operations without anesthesia, executed to close vaginal fistula that were leaking piss and shit, executed without anesthesia not because it was not available, but because the doctor did not believe that black women felt pain. I can write this down, here, in this essay, as you can now stop for a minute if you need to collect yourself, as you listen to what this narrative does to your inside. You might feel a clench deep down in your torso, like many of us did, a kinesthetic empathy that translates itself across text, time and space, and which became a core choreographic element in our Anarcha poetics.I do not speak about the medical facts directly in a face-to-face presentation where there is no place to hide, no place to turn away. Instead, I point to a secret at the heart of the Anarcha Project, and explain where all the medical and historical data can be found (in the Anarcha Project essay, “Remembering Anarcha,” in the on-line performance studies journal Liminalities site, free and accessible to all without subscription, now frequently used in bioethics education (see: http://www.liminalities.net/4-2). The people in the round, then, have only a vague sense of what the project is about, and I explain why this formal frame appears instead of open disclosure. I ask their permission to proceed. They either give it to me, or else our circle becomes something else, and we speak about performance practices and formal means of speaking about trauma instead.Having marked the space as one in which we agree on a specific framework or rule, having set up a space apart, we begin. One by one, raw and without preamble, people in the circle read what they have been given. The meaning of what they are reading only comes to them as they are reading—they have had little time to familiarise themselves with the words beforehand. Someone reads a poem about being held as a baby by one’s mother, being accepted, even through the writer’s body is so different. Someone reads about the persistence of shame. Someone reads about how incontinence is so often the borderline for independent living in contemporary cultures—up to here, freedom; past this point, at the point of leakage, the nursing home. Someone reads about her mother’s upset about digging up that awful past again. Someone reads about fibroid tumors in African-American women. Someone reads about the Venus Hottentott. Someone begins to cry (most recently at a Feminisms and Rhetorics conference), crying softly, and there is no knowing about why, but there is companionship, and quiet contemplation, and it is ok. These presentations start with low-key chatting, setting up the circle, and end the same way—once we have made our way around, once our fragments are read out, we just sit and talk, no “presentation-mode” emerges, and no one gets up into high drama. We’ve all taken strange things into our mouths, talked of piss and shit and blood and race and oppression and love and survival. Did we get free of ourselves, of the inevitability of narrative, in the attention to articulation, elocution, the performance of words, even if just for a moment? Did we taste the words on our tongues, material physical traces of a different form of embodiment? Container/ConclusionThe poet Anne Carson attended one of our Anarcha presentations, and her comments to us that evening helped to frame our subsequent work for me—she called our work creating a container, a vessel for experience, without sharing the specifics of that experience. I have since explored this image further, thought about amphorae as commemorative vases, thought of earth and clay as materials, thought of the illustrations on ancient vessels, on pattern and form, flow and movement. The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane?These disclosures are traces of life, and I can touch them. I never get bored by them. Come and sit by my side, and we share in this river flow border vessel cell life.ReferencesBritzman, Deborah P. "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight." 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