This blog post was written by FEELed Lab Member Emma Carey, a Master’s student in UBCO’s Interdisciplinary Sustainability program, who is also working on the Enhancing Access and Inclusion in Environmental Humanities Research Practice Project.
Before coming to the Okanagan for my master’s, I worked at a non-profit for two years. They had a great, well-meaning initiative around access and inclusion where employees participated in workshops to think about the kinds of language they use and how identity helps form one’s ideas and values.
Yet, these workshops, delivered by an external company, were very heavily structured and left little room for deep discussion and relation building with my colleagues. We would be talked at for an hour by a facilitator with small break-away discussion activities interspersed. I often came away from those workshops feeling frustrated that there was no space to truly dive deeper into these important topics.
Last month, as part of the access and inclusion project led by Astrida, our team held our first storytelling workshop. You may be wondering: what does storytelling have to do with access and inclusion? Partly guided by Matt’s creative writing experience, we have become curious about how stories can reveal something about nuances of access and inclusion through lived experience that other forms of knowledge (e.g. reports, surveys) do not.
For example: how do stories capture our own experiences of access while participating in this project? We’ve been working on this project for a little over a year and we wanted to explore what memories remain in our bodies at this point. What remains can reveal the concepts and processes that have been most impactful to each of us.
Everyone on the project team therefore wrote a (simple, short 250-word) story that retold one of these memories. At the workshop, everyone read out their story, and we discussed them together (spoiler alert, each person focused on something different in their story!). We examined the text and subtext, the choice of words, the format, the voice, and other aspects. All of this revealed something about the ways the stories relate to access and inclusion topics.
I wrote and shared a story about how I felt leading a workshop at a conference this summer on our project, using zine-making methods. You can read the blog post about it here.
As an early-career scholar, it was quite intimidating to lead my first workshop and I felt anxious leading up to it. The intensity of the anxiety increased as external factors kept changing, like where the workshop would happen and what the room layout would look like. Ultimately, it was the generous people in the workshop room with me that made me feel more comfortable and able to lead in spite of my anxiety.
What a difference this format of workshop makes in how deep our discussion can go! Many of us felt comfortable sharing personal experiences with access which was made possible through the storytelling format. Writing, sharing, and discussing stories requires vulnerability and honesty, which is also necessary for good access and inclusion work.
As a group, we’ve often discussed the benefits of slowness, taking our time and not feeling rushed. I’ve been feeling quite grateful for this slow intentionality that has enabled us to build strong relationships with each other. In comparing it with my previous experience of inclusion workshops, I think this kind of work cannot be done without long-term relationship building.
The FEELed lab 