Creative and Theatre Methods as Affective and Epistemic Mutual Aid in Feminist Anticolonial Research

This talk invited you to help me think through how creative and theatre methods might be both an affective and epistemic resource in feminist anticolonial research. I will share examples from a range of participatory arts-based projects—including work in the UK with hospice art therapists, Sri Lankan tea plantation workers and trade union leaders and street-based sex-workers in Cape Town —to show these methods in practice.

Creative and theatre methods have the capacity to hold and convey experiences that exceed language and rationality: the somatic, the unspoken, the withdrawn. They can work with opacity rather than against it, refusing demands for transparent legibility and complicating ableist assumptions about presence. Yet these methods are not only about different forms of representation. They also gather us together. I will suggest that the communality of creative practice—bodies together, the shared risks of making and playing, the distributed work of un/meaning-making—enact forms of epistemic collectivity that challenge extractive research logics. Creative and theatre methods do this in their capacities to minnow. That is, to flash mob around the shape of our unknowing. At a time of intensifying hostility towards progressive politics and care, I suggest that these communal aspects of creative methods carry particular significance and potential. They prefigure the worlds feminist anticolonial research seeks to build, modelling what I call epistemic mutual aid: research as solidarity and collective capacity-building rather than a privatised, neoliberal individual achievement.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a sociologist at King’s College (London) with a particular interest in feminist and anti-racist methodologies, migration and diaspora, disability, care and critical pedagogies. She is interested in how different types of dispossession are produced, lived with and remade and how these processes create new forms of local and global life.

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