Becoming Through Story: The Relational Processes of Writing and Creating the StOries Project

Abstract

This final chapter is not a typical recapitulation of the stories and ideas presented in this anthology. Rather it is a storied approach to reflecting on the relational processes of the StOries project, in order to contemplate what we have learned and to propose where we might go from here. I interweave my own reflections (and diffractions) of the challenges faced in writing this discussion of ‘fieldnotes’ that a number of authors submitted to describe their own writing processes. I also showcase examples of methods used in the project to illustrate how we generated meaningful introductions and discussions about identity, intersectionality, home, and belonging (among other things). Ideally the chapter will be read not as a conclusion, but as an opening to new ways of viewing ourselves and each other in the context of migration research. It also aims to promote the Indigenization of migration scholarship and the institutions that teach and create this scholarship, and to encourage discussions and changes in how we view people who migrate.

To write is also to become something other than a writer.

(Deleuze, 1993/1997, p. 6)

This anthology set out to amplify the lived experiences of graduate students in a Canadian multicultural context in order to highlight the complex and often invisible intersectional dimensions of those experiences. These students included both international students and domestic students from immigrant family backgrounds. In the process of doing so, the stories showcased in this anthology have exemplified how the relations entangled in migration experiences transcend the false boundaries of subject, object, time and space and even the living and non-living, human and nonhuman. As immigrant writers have shown time and again, the search for home and belonging is part of this entanglement. Likewise, any attempt at separating the individual lived experience from the social, political, and economic forces that shape our collective consciousness is at best inadequate. Yet, the stories of this anthology also showcase the healing aspects of sharing stories at a personal level, raising questions about what new has been learned about the benefits of story (−writing, −telling) with respect to migration, multicultural experience, and even the self.

The purpose of this chapter is to, therefore, pick up the threads woven throughout this anthology to ask what has been learned in the process of writing these stories and where do we go now? What might we create with these threads going forward? In Chap. 2, Alka Kumar explains that the approach of the StOries project was experimental, bringing novice graduate student writers together in a series of academically-engaged creative writing workshops. This approach was largely informed by critical pedagogy as a way to support the participants (including myself) to develop our own critiques of the power structures in which we find ourselves entangled (e.g., within migration experience, the field and practice of migration professions, higher education). Although the workshop series was not designed as a formal research study, the philosophical orientation and the open-ended, peer-led model of the project is commensurate with approaches to research that view theory and method as inextricable and anchored in philosophical concepts (Murris, 2021a).

This orientation and centring of story as method, and experience as relational knowledge, also reinforces and reiterates the imperative role of decolonization efforts the transformation of higher education by Indigenizing pedagogy and the ‘research’ that is generated through teaching and learning (Dwayne, 2012). It is from this perspective that I take up the threads of this anthology, to ponder how the focus on belonging and intersectionality that we began with at the start of this project may not reflect this project’s dynamic relationships and current scholarly (and community) commitments. This includes our alignment with efforts to question the ways in which ongoing colonization continues to shape the very foundational ways we conceptualize migration and migration scholarship (Ellerman & O’Heran, 2021). It goes without saying that the predominant language in the field of migration (i.e., English including its variations) also underpins the knowledge paradigm, and associated logic, that most migration scholarship operates within. As discussed periodically throughout this project, working in English for many of us both imposed constraints on, and afforded certain opportunities for, developing our understanding(s). I hope in this chapter to spark some questions about knowledge and narrative, and the language and logics by which they are constructed, to consider how this may be relevant to the field of migration.

In order to do so, I have organized this chapter in the following way. First, I describe the processes and challenges involved in constructing this chapter. This includes some of my own reflections about my contribution as a co-author/editor, and what I found difficult about how the chapter was initially conceptualized, i.e. as a collection of ‘fieldnotes’ about the writing process. Second, I discuss excerpts of reflections of StOries project contributors (i.e., the submitted fieldnotes) in relation to the literature on migration stories, to show how their relevant themes converge or in some cases diverge from what is often discussed. Importantly, not every contributor had the time or energy to submit a fieldnote as originally intended. However, those who were able, to each submitted short passages – sometimes a paragraph, sometimes one to two pages. Excerpts from these passages help the reader understand the writing processes behind the final stories, and also provide additional layers of meaning to the stories, poems, and images of migration experiences that have been shared. They may also testify to how we understand fieldnotes themselves, culturally speaking, i.e., how the idea of ‘fieldnotes’ has infiltrated our common-sense research and writing vernaculars.

Finally, I share examples from two of the peer-led activities that speak to the interrelatedness of participants’ sense of self that was not revealed in the fieldnote reflections. The first was an activity that aimed to generate discussion not only about translation but about the role of language in making sense of sensory experience. The other was an activity that had participants share, write, and speak about objects that hold deep meaning in our lives, as a way of also generating discussion about our embodied memories and experiences. In actuality these activities occurred in reverse order during the six-month period that we actively met bi-weekly (on-line). The meaningful objects activity was particularly significant because it helped to generate a sense of camaraderie among most participants early on in the project. In concluding this chapter, I share the images and captions of these meaningful objects, much as we did during the original sessions and in later presentations, as a way to disrupt traditional academic introductions that identify us by our expertise, institutions affiliations, and outputs. The reader may also recognize in these images and captions how they served to catalyze the development of our final stories, or provided insights that would help shape those stories, insights that many participants had yet to articulate. The sensory words activity built on the meaningful objects activity because it helped us to tap further into some of the intangible relationships we have in the world, for example to the sounds that shape our very development and existence as emplaced humans. Discussing these aspects of the project together, I hope to show that what began as an enquiry into contemporary Canadian multiculturalism and sense of belonging transformed into an ongoing work-in-progress – both collectively and personally – and a testimony to our interrelatedness. By highlighting this continuous becoming, I hope this chapter contributes to the future mapping of relational (i.e., more than individual and collective) migration experiences.

1 The ‘Becoming’ of This Chapter: A Reflexive (Diffractive?) Background

The original conception of this chapter was that it would be a way to document the processes and methods used in the project and especially in writing this anthology, both by individual participants as well as the group. We did this by deliberately inviting the authors to think and write about their processes of writing in a format that was originally conceptualised as a collection of fieldnotes. The chapter’s editorial team initially included a graduate student with a degree in fine arts and media studies (Chelsea Richards, M.A.) and a recent graduate in communications currently working in the area of immigrant settlement (Sarah Ostapchuck, M.A.). Given their backgrounds a more creative or literary approach was envisioned, and I was invited to join them because of my training in anthropology and my experience with ethnography and fieldwork methods. Together we were to describe the writing process and showcase the multisensory engagements that helped develop the final stories. The ‘fieldnotes’ would be reflections about the writing process generated by prompts that the first two original authors (Ostapchuck and Richards) had together developed in conversation with the primary editor and project lead (Alka Kumar). Our intention was to curate the reflections so they would be accessible to readers who may be deeply entrenched in the migration-oriented professions but not necessarily in direct conversation with the academic discourses and disciplines that may be influencing or impacting their work.

In addition to thematically analysing the submitted reflections, my contribution was to include a short introduction about ethnography and fieldnote writing. The purpose was to explain how certain threads of the methodology (e.g., the inclusion of images as well as words as part of the documentations) were present in the development of the StOries Project, as evidenced by the vignettes of the writing processes that authors submitted and that were to be the focus of this chapter. However, we questioned whether the chapter should be more theoretically oriented or presented in a literary or even thematic fashion. After several initial drafts reviewed by the book’s editors, two things became clear: (1) we were having difficulty getting on the same page about our writing approach; and (2) this final chapter would need to speak to a research-oriented audience. In the end, due partly to additional pressures (academic, professional, and familial), the other two contributors were unable to see out the completion of this chapter in the way they had initially intended, rendering the first challenge a moot point. I think it’s important to state that certain circumstances allowed me to persist in the writing of this chapter, including the financial support I receive from a fellowship. This is something to be aware of when asking people with migration backgrounds to share their stories, as the work of sharing stories takes a good deal of unpaid emotional labour. In other words, this chapter might have looked quite different if one of the other interested contributors’ circumstances had allowed them to see it through. As it stands, it is my own attempt at making sense of this process, although I have consulted with both to check that this portrayal resonates with their experience.

I point this out because this process of trying to get on the same page about this chapter – i.e., of moving back and forth between a ‘storytelling’ format and one that was more heavily framed by ‘research’ – made me think deeply about the tensions between these two ways of thinking about knowledge. This in turn led me to the current conceptualization of this chapter: a discussion about the relationship between story and knowledge and its relevance to migration experience and the field of migration research in particular. I hope to show that consideration of the ontological underpinnings of both story and knowledge may also help us to shift our understandings of ‘migrants’ as individuals (i.e., immigrants, refugees, international students, transnationals etc.) to beings-in-relation. In the context of this anthology, this also serves to highlight the position of the authors as ‘in between’ the institutions (government, university, publisher) that require this project to resemble ‘research’ as proof of its authenticity and legitimacy (a notion that the project resisted from the beginning). As I propose below, this chapter has come into being through a constant revisioning of our understanding of this project as it unfolded over a period of shifting terrain of personal and collective knowledge and experience. Furthermore, while the authors became writers through the process of writing the stories of the preceding chapters, they may also become ‘narratavised’ (Askin, 2016) as beings-in-relation, a process entangled through writing with the multiple and inseparable relations it describes. In suggesting this, I recognise also that this term may seem antithetical to the value of stories (rather than narratives) as “theory, as process, as data, as text on the ethical grounds of accessibility and foregrounding the marginalized (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). What is important is that the storying of these processes, and the way I came to this understanding, are the focus of this chapter.

2 Why (Not) ‘Fieldnotes’?

Though it’s not always the most intuitive way to tell a story, I will begin at the beginning, which for me was contemplating my own understanding of fieldnotes as a former student of anthropology who has also been involved in a number of qualitative health research projects over the years. Within the broad field of cultural anthropology, fieldnotes developed as a way to reflexively document a researcher’s experiences in ‘the field’ in order to account for the subjectivity of the ethnographer, their ‘participant observation’ of cultural group or phenomena, and the intersubjective relations between ethnographer and informant(s). The artful intermingling (triangulation) of notes from the field with the perspectives of ‘key informants’ and theoretical texts was a way the cultural anthropologist could conduct ethnography – a practice dually constructed as the process of engaging in field research and the product of that process, i.e., ethnographies. A good ethnography, it came to be thought, could help the reader better understand a cultural group or phenomena by providing detailed and nuanced description of the particularities or local context based on detailed participant observations.

Outside of anthropology, these central components of ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation were associated with the Polish born British social anthropologist Bronisalw Maliniowski. What is less known among non-anthropologists is the history of this association. By tracing the roots of fieldwork to the shift from ‘data collection’ by missionaries to trained academics, anthropology historian George Stocking (1983) argued that Malinowski’s image as the quintessential ethnographer is somewhat circumstantial, but also shrouded in myth. Within more recent history ethnography beyond anthropology is perhaps most often associated with American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s proposition that “ethnography is thick description” (Geertz, 1973, p. 314), though importantly, ethnography for Geertz included much more than notetaking. Geertz was trying to argue for an interpretivist anthropology for which written ethnography was its method of reading culture by interpreting the symbolic meanings of social life (action). This was in the context of ongoing debates within anthropology about the definition of ‘culture’, and attempts to define anthropology itself as either science or art. The history and development of fieldwork methods within anthropology is an important topic, however, the legacy of that history on academic research more broadly is what I wish to draw attention to here.

The role of ethnography as a tool for critically and reflexively documenting and describing the wider contexts of cultural phenomena is what has made ethnography and related methods, especially participant observation and the practice of fieldnotes, appealing to a wide range of fields and disciplines. Qualitative health research was one such field, and this has resulted in a deeper understanding of the cultural dimensions of health and illness, along with reduced attention to the interpretation of culture in the broad sense (and over time) was the point of ethnography (Rashid et al., 2015). Qualitative health research can help contextualize or counter positivist accounts of health and illness and the development of autoethnography in particular has allowed researchers to attend self-reflexively to ‘lived experience’(Rashid et al., 2015). Within the last few decades, Indigenous scholars have critiqued these methods in order to make rightful space for Indigenous knowledge within western academic institutions (e.g., Smith, 2021[1999]; Archibald, 2008). This critical scholarship has also contributed to the development of methodologies that centre the experience of the researcher. For example, there are many examples of writing about the lived experiences of migration that use an autoethnographic methodology (e.g., Wright, 2009; see Burge, 2020, p.5). Narrative inquiry is another approach grounded in story and self-reflection that is becoming more widely used in migration studies (e.g., Kubota et al., 2022; Kovinthan, 2016). In comparison with traditional ethnography, one value of narrative inquiry is its construction of the ‘field’ as place, time and relationship (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) rather than a circumscribed community or environment. To be clear, ethnography including (but not limited to) the practice of fieldnote taking continues to have an important place in research, for example in providing more nuanced understandings of the cultural embodiment and enactment of suicide (Kirmeyer, 2022). The point here is not so much a critique of ethnography but to point out its legacy within wider scholarship practices and its relevance to this chapter, and the field of migration studies.

As explained in Chap. 1, our StOries project was not framed as a traditional research study, and more specifically not as ethnography, although it was informed by autoethnographic rationale and methodology. In addition to engaging critically with the provided materials, participants were encouraged to journal as much as possible about our writing processes. These documentations included individual journal reflections and responses to writing prompts and activities, along with our memories and other imaginings, as well as journaling (individually) in a shared document where we could respond to one another. Given our different life circumstances and responsibilities, each author did this in their own way and in their own time, and so, at best, were partial reflections of what occurred. For this reason, many of the submissions were not themselves ‘raw fieldnotes’, but rather curations of self-reflections of the processes documented in our journals, generated by responses to the specific writing prompts we used to develop this chapter. These prompts included questions such as: How did you arrive at your final story submission? What kind of challenges did you face in the process? How did your story/submission change over time? How has your perspective changed in this process? We also encouraged the contributors to review their journaling, including and doodles and images that were part their process, to answer these questions. The goal was to help the reader experience the evolving journey by reading not only the story contributions themselves, but also stories about the processes that produced these writings.

Part of my hesitancy for calling these ‘fieldnotes’ was concern they might be interpreted, not only as process and context, but as ‘truth’ in a fixed, categorical sort of way. This apprehension stems from my observation of how fieldnotes are sometimes used or taught to students, for example in some ‘mixed methods’ research that gives primacy to not only quantitative outcomes but positivist views of knowledge for interpreting them. Qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, may come to be seen as providing ‘context’ (perspectives, experiences) that numbers alone do not account for, diminishing what they might tell us beyond the specificity of the original line of inquiry – which is where ethnography can often be most helpful. The interpretive anthropology that Geertz promoted was not concerned with the “ontological status” of cultural or observed phenomena; rather he was interested in asking questions about “what their import is” (p. 315), i.e., their cultural significance. However, because of the way ethnography has evolved beyond the discipline of anthropology – and because ethnography is not merely method, nor to be to be equated with anthropology (Nader, 2011; Ingold, 2017) – how we understand what we document through fieldnotes ontologically is essential. More importantly, the history of this theory-writing method includes harms to Indigenous peoples (Smith, 2021[1999]), and therefore (as with any method) its use must be critically and carefully considered. Finally, the way we understand fieldnotes can have an impact on how we approach them, including what we take note of and how we characterise our observations in writing.

To expand this argument a bit further, I was also concerned that by framing our chapter as fieldnotes focused on ‘truth-telling’ (nonetheless an important goal), we might unintentionally obscure elements of the process that were perhaps more important than would be otherwise apparent. These include changes in thinking that we experienced through the sharing of our stories and the concomitant (re)constructions of identity, as well as what may have been for some a movement in the locus of self we experienced as part of the process. My hope was to settle on a vision of this chapter that would both capture what we did while also accounting for the culturally constructed worlds we inhabit and therefore inhabited our writing, including our academic and professional worlds. It is therefore our place as authors within such wider conversations that this chapter seeks to untangle. By thinking carefully about the significance of storytelling in the StOries project, I ask what can be learned from it in the wider field of migration studies. For instance, although general interest in migration and the stories of immigrants and refugees might be driven by humanistic values, those values might both undermine a deeper valuing and understanding of the wisdom of stories themselves, and underestimate the harmful power that stories may also wield (King, 2003). This raises questions about the ways we engage in storytelling within the field of migration and how we ensure we are attending to relational commitments when sharing those stories (knowledge) with others.

Settler scholar and educator Erin Goheen Glanville has critiques what she calls “imaginative humanitarian ethnography” in pedagogical approaches that use stories to teach about refugee culture in the classroom. Notably, Glanville’s work takes inspiration and wisdom from the teachings of Jo-ann Archibald (Q’um Q’um Xiiem), Indigenous scholar, educator and member of of the Stól:lō Nation. To help situate Indigenous knowledges within the academy as knowledge in its own right, Archibald (2008) outlined a framework of seven “storywork” principles she learned through committed relationships with elders in her community. She used the metaphor of a basket to symbolize how the principles are woven together as well as how she “gives back” to community through storywork. Our attempts to understand the power of story from the view that story is knowledge in its own right can also give us pause to think about what we are doing when we engage in the act of sharing stories, particularly when we share them in written form, as in this anthology. As Archibald emphasized: “An interrelationship between the story, storytelling, and listener is another critical principle of storywork” (2008, p.32). Following Archibald, Glanville links her critique and critical pedagogical approach to Indigenous storytelling principles, proposing we think of stories as gifts to be shared and listened to. As Glanville argues, this entails changes to our reading practices and our understanding of the story process. Rather than thinking instrumentally (and methodologically) about what stories can do, she argues that we begin thinking critically about what happens to stories once they are told. It is this care-full/heart-full approach that I encourage readers to adopt in reading through the remainder of this chapter, and indeed when considering what can be learned or shared from the stories of this anthology.

Finally, the responses to the writing prompts illuminated the complex meanings of many of the writings and discussions generated in the peer-led sessions, however, to focus solely on these might miss almost entirely the deeper reason why the StOries project had such a deep impact on so many of us who participated: because in some way or other it had changed us in relation to each other but also in relation to the world. In other words, I began to wonder if interweaving of ‘fieldnotes’ might not be sufficient for understanding the possibilities for our selves that were both imagined and generated through the StOries project. In the following section, I consider a few themes from the submissions that resonate with issues of concern within the migration stories literature. I then discuss how critical and Indigenous perspectives related to story as relational knowledge might serve as foundation for appreciating the interrelated complexities and becomings of the StOries project that contributors of this project have shared – as gifts to the reader. Though issues of identity and belonging will always remain important aspects of the migration experience, it is the becoming of the StOries project, the stories themselves, and the storytellers that I wish to shed light on.

3 From ‘Belonging’ to ‘Becoming’

We began this StOries project with a general query about our sense of belonging as graduate students within and between various structures and boundaries of multicultural Canada and higher education. In the domain of migration stories, many authors, both literary and academic, have articulated in some way the experience of living life ‘in between’, its impact on self and identity, and the role of writing as a way to express experiences of hybridity, and even ambivalence: “Whatever may be the geographical location of the migrant writer, in the mental landscape the writer is forever entangled among the strings attached to poles that pull in opposite directions” (Pourjafari & Vahidipour, 2014, p. 685). This feeling of life in the margins resonated through not only the stories of this anthology, but also the reflections submitted for this chapter. Though we might associate such entanglements as a struggle to feel ‘at home’ with one’s circumstances, one StOries participant framed this as an (unintended) positive outcome of her experience:

It took the passing of my grandmother for me to quite understand that I never fully arrived in this country. It took going back home for me to finally grasp that I do live in-between, and it’s hard, but it’s also beautiful. (Thàbata Da Costa, April 10, 2022).

Many StOries participants felt an urgency to share their stories, as noted by the following two contributors:

The creative writing aspect of the StOries project connected me with thoughts and ideas that had not surfaced for years. I migrated in 1982 and over time had not thought much about home. Being in a group of younger people, newer immigrants to Canada, some of the dormant inner stories started to surface. Something emerged in discussions that caused those quietened narratives of home to surface (Bibi Babksh, March 7, 2022).

When I first saw the call for proposals, I felt this urgent need to write the proposal and send it right away, as I felt this project was tailored to my need to speak up. I opened the door to memories and went down the rabbit hole (Jenny Osorio, February 25, 2022).

Other participants similarly described a synergy (Archibald, 2008) that had a lot to do with the timing of the project in participants’ personal and academic lives, but also the circumstances brought on by the pandemic (see Chap. 22). While many saw this is a positive opportunity to engage in writing, others focused on the challenging and humbling nature of that process:

I started writing by letting my emotions guide me. There were times when words came easily and flowed, whereas other times I would not have much luck putting words to my thoughts or feelings. (Christian Hui, April 20, 2022)

The most difficult thing for me was tapping into my emotions and repressed memories so that I could be vulnerable on paper. My initial drafts were quite distant, and more on the academic side of writing. The early drafts had an ‘outsider looking in’ type of feel, almost as if I was tip-toeing around real feelings. It took many revisions for me to write a more personal story and I mentally fought with myself on multiple occasions because I wanted to have a deeper story but I didn’t want to open up to the point where I would regret what I wrote, especially for others to read. I eventually let my guard down and poured out the experiences I felt were important for me to share (Cheslea Richards, April 22, 2022).

What I’ll never forget is how emotional many of us became when sharing about our COVID-19 experiences in five words. Several peers cried as they shared their stories and I cried with them (Sarah Ostapchuck, June 1, 2022).

Together these submission excerpts speak to the role of writing in emotional expression, and the reciprocity that can occur when stories are shared in community, perhaps especially when these are shared orally. The power of those moments is even more poignant, however, when their voicing comes as a determination to share stories after years of silence/being silenced, or living in the inherited shadow of silence.

As articulated in the following fieldnote contribution, the interconnectedness we can feel through sharing and receiving stories is also a mark of good storytelling:

One of the best compliments a storyteller can receive is that readers were able to relate to the story or the peculiarity of the characters. I personally strive to represent as many types of people as possible. But to do that is to have all those lived experiences. Otherwise, it will become the cliched male writer writing two-dimensional female characters. I cannot write on behalf of a female person, or a black person, or a disabled person, or, for that matter, even a white cis-male. One way to circumvent this is to write what you know, write from your own standpoint. However, this would deprive others from being able to relate to what you write. What is of particular note is why I chose to tell this grand narrative rather than to write abstractly an imagined story, or write my own story as if an abstract entity went through those experiences. But that, again, would still represent a very small portion of the readers who can put themselves in my shoes, despite it being abstract. And, so, as I usually do, I went for a larger-than-life theme with abstract entities. A spirit of the form I conceived could easily be imagined as an impersonation of a reader, no matter their class, gender, socioeconomic standing, etc. Moreover, this theme is something that should reach as many people as possible. Given these reasons and my training as a philosopher made me arrive at this as my final story submission. This, thus, becomes your story, my story, all of our story (Arunkumar Javel, June 1, 2022).

Early childhood educator Louise Phillips and Ngugi/Wakka Wakka educator Tracey Bunda (2018, p. 43) have outlined five principles of storying that resonate in different ways with experiences shared by StOries project participants:

• 1. storying nourishes thought, body and soul

• 2. storying claims voice in the silenced margins

• 3. storying is embodied, relational, meaning making

• 4. storying intersects the past and present as living oral archives

• 5. storying enacts collective ownership and authorship

Together these principles raise questions about distinctions between the individual and collective experience in story (and the care needed when sharing stories which I discuss further on). Likewise, during the StOries project workshop in Toronto, a student asked our guest speaker, acclaimed Canadian author MG Vassanji, where he finds sources of inspiration for his writing. This was a moment in the project that stood out to me as it was pivotal in propelling me forward with my own writing in its simple wisdom. Vassanji replied very plainly that at a certain point he had simply started listening to the elders around him who wanted to share their stories. He only said a few words about this, but they spoke deeply to the understanding that a writer is not simply expressing themself as one might suppose. Writers are as much a part of the world as the world is a part of them – and through this process of deeply listening to the stories of others, new stories emerge albeit expressed in new form. In a way the interconnected stories that flow from one to the next are there all along, waiting to be connected, a puzzle waiting to be pieced together.

Comer (2015), drawing on James Clifford’s work (1997) for her analysis of the “roots and routes” of the migrant personal essay, wrote in her doctoral dissertation that “[m]igrants can tell their stories from different vantage points, depending on the age they migrated and the age at which they write about their experience” (p. 38). She also contends that: “The story of migration begins long before we do, even as our own narrative begins long before we do. The journey and narrative preceed [sic] us. We are en route years before we migrate or write” (p. 72). In this anthology, StOries project contributors who are first or second generation Canadian show in their writings how migration narratives can also be transgenerational, the narrative beginning long before and rooted perhaps in the migration of those from whom the writer descended. This speaks not only to the relational aspects of story and narrative but the interrelatedness at the heart of the migration experience.

The stories in this anthology, as well as some of the reflections presented below, grapple with these questions and entanglements, often in relation to sense of belonging and sense of home, a common trope in migration literature. Schwind and Kwok (2021) analyzed creative writing based on self-reflections of their own immigrant experiences. They contend that: “A sense of belonging is entwined closely with voice, of being able to communicate clearly, to be heard, seen, and included” (2021, p. 23). Similarly, Claudia Chibici-Revneanu (2016) argued that expressive writing may be a strategy for increasing the wellbeing and integration of migrants, particularly those who are women. The self-development of migrant women was shared as a unique result of Chibici- Revneanu’ research. These authors show through excerpts of creative writing how the in-betweenness of the migrant experience can silence lived experiences in multiple contexts, making it difficult to connect authentically in the contexts we arrive in as well as those we leave behind. For example, the intersectional experiences of migrants who may be vulnerable due to discrimination based on race, sex, gender identity/sexuality etc., may face more barriers to finding a sense of belonging that makes space for the voicing of their particular experiences.

As one StOries project participant reflected, language can play a role in this too by providing the means to reclaim that which has been silenced in the past (including language itself) – or the choice to keep silent the deepest pains and losses that may be unspeakable (or unwitnessable) in the present:

I did not know what my final submission would look like. In the process, I answered to writing prompts, picking up memories and arranging small unique bouquets. While writing, I realized I could only incorporate a few words in Spanish. No matter how hard I tried, I would always get a knot in my throat and words stopped flowing. It was too close to home. I was standing too close to the fire. English allows me to remember while maintaining a safe distance. (Jenny Osorio, February 25, 2022)

Several submissions also show that the intersectional and interconnected identities of migrants can be revealed through writing in ways that not only challenge tired stereotypes, but that demonstrate how their identities must not be reduced to their migration experiences. The following submission exemplifies this:

Somehow, my experience as a child protection worker seeped into this piece – it is not about being an immigrant but about how my profession seeps into my thoughts at odd times and takes command of the internal narrative. (Bibi Babksh, March 7, 2022)

The journal excerpts shared by Babksh, are particularly poignant, amplified by the passing and blurring of time and space in her memories:

I am unaware of a time that I was on the other side of the road. The side that was filled with a sense of belonging. I know I was there, but I can’t remember when. I vaguely recall a song about being in a place “where everybody knows your name” and realized that I had been in a different place for a very long time. But I was there at some point. I knew my name and everyone else did too. They called me by my name; I belonged. Then I crossed the road. Or was it a river? Maybe an ocean? I am here on the other side. I have been here for a long time and nobody knows my name. They can’t pronounce it and I wonder if maybe I should change it and if doing so would help me to belong. But a name is not the only thing that one needs for belonging. If I start changing my name, then what next? My beliefs? My skin colour? (Bibi Babksh, March 7, 2022)

Babksh’s musings remind us of Svwind and Kwok’s observation that: “As immigrants, we are expected to put our cultural roots and identities aside to acculturate to the new social context. We are expected to learn a new language, norms, and culture, and establish experiences and skills, to adjust to our new home” (2021, p.23). By centring our understanding of migrants in terms of individual identity we reduce real people to the realm of categories, rather than recognizing them as the interrelational life forces they, interconnected to not only humans, but also animals, plants and objects, spirits. Interrelated not only in place but across time that is itself interrelated and difficult to disentangle. This is the wisdom of Indigenous and Eastern worldviews that continue to be oppressed in academic settings that overvalue objectivity and falsely separate it from subjective experience reinforced by the continued dominance English (and other colonial languages) in academic settings, including teaching and learning spaces viewed as multilingual (see Smith, 2021 [1999], p. 40; Phipps, 2019).

Yet, we need to be explicit and conscientious about what we mean when we talk about relationality, a term that can imply different paradigmatic assumptions and orientations, beginning with worldview. Writing about the power and paradoxes of history in decolonization work, Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote (2021[1999]) that: “To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things” (Smith, 2021[1999], p. 38). Western academia has learned much about relationality through processes intertwined with colonization and efforts to decolonize and Indigenize those same processes (e.g., within academic research and education). In a time when many speak and write of ‘paradigm shifts’ within and beyond academic circles, knowledge keeper Shawn Wilson’s (2001) explanation of ‘paradigm’ is instructive:

[…] a paradigm is simply a label for a set of beliefs that go together that guide my actions. So a research paradigm is a set of beliefs about the world and about gaining knowledge that go together to guide your actions as to how you’re going to go about doing your research. When I was thinking about this, I focused on four aspects that combine in the make-up of different paradigms. One is ontology or a belief in the nature of reality. Your way of being, what you believe is real in the world: that’s your ontology. Second is epistemology, which is how you think about reality. Next, when we talk about research methodology, we are talking about how you are going to use your ways of thinking (your epistemology) to gain more knowledge about your reality. Finally, a paradigm includes axiology, which is a set of morals or a set of ethics (p. 175, italics added).

Unfortunately, these aspects of our beliefs – ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology – are not always carefully teased out in the ways we propose, conduct, and report on research in academia, but they each make a difference in how we approach the work we do and why. What underlies such omissions is often how we understand this English term ‘knowledge’, which culturally we treat as something we can possess, in our minds. In practice, we teach and learn from (and with) one another through experience, and though most graduate students love a great lecture, some of the greatest learning we do is arguably informal (e.g., when an instructor shares a story of their own experience in academia).

As Wilson observed, from a western, eurocentric (christian, capitalist) worldview, “knowledge may be owned by an individual” whereas in an Indigenous worldview, “[k]knowledge is shared with all creation” including the cosmos (Wilson, 2001, p. 176–177). He adds that those “relationships [with all creation] are more important than reality” (Wilson, 2001, p. 177). Although Wilson’s focus here is on conceptions of (relational) knowledge, it often seems that non-Indigenous conceptions of relationality focus more on human social relationships, and particularly the individualism of ‘modern’, ‘western’ societies. Concerned about the individualism embedded in humanistic counselling practices, for example, social psychologist Kenneth Gergen (2015) observed that the primacy of the individual promotes social isolation, self-obsession, relationship deterioration, and a tendency to blame individuals for the ills they experience due to society. Arguing that western humanism was conceived as an alternative to the reductive tendencies of materialism and positivism, Gergen proposed relational humanism as an alternative, as a way to de-centre the individual and emphasize plural constructions of meaning. Yet, there is an inherent imperialist paradox to this view. As Smith (2021[1999]) explained:

The struggle to assert and claim humanity has been a consistent thread of anti-colonial discourses on colonialism and oppression. This struggle for humanity has generally been framed within the wider discourse of humanism, the appeal to human ‘rights’, the notion of a universal human subject, and the connections between being human and being capable of creating history, knowledge and society. The focus on asserting humanity has to be seen within the anti-colonial analysis of imperialism and what were seen as imperialism’s dehumanizing imperatives, which were structured into the language, economy, social relations and cultural life of colonial societies (Smith, 2021[1999], p. 29)

Although humanistic appeals might elevate the value of traditional and embodied knowledges often excluded in educational and professional contexts, humanism itself is a eurocentric way of viewing the world (Gergen, 2015). Furthermore, the way we understand and construct knowledge itself is a deeper part of what is at stake. 

In 2022 it seems impossible to ignore the role that language and its noun-based structure, particularly English, plays in shaping the hegemonic forces we seek to resist, for example the dominant biomedical categorizations that may pathologize human experience, or the neoliberal focus on productivity and outcomes (see Phipps, 2019). As articulated in a collaboratively written article by Chiblow & Meighan (2022), the loss of language diversity in knowing the world has real environmental consequences:

Indigenous languages are important for many reasons. One major reason that I think about frequently is a unique, relational way of naming, seeing, and relating to the world, which is particular to a specific area, land, and ecosystem. Indigenous languages are like ecological encyclopedias and ancestral guides with profound knowledge cultivated over centuries. If these languages are not passed on, then this wisdom is lost to humanity and the generations to come. […] On the other hand, dominant, non-endangered languages, such as English, carry legacies of imperialism, assimilation, and colonialism, and can be easily decontextualized or disembodied from historical context, land, and place (p. 207).

As I contemplated in my story contribution to this anthology, the value of property and ownership (in general, but of land in particular) is deeply intertwined in the immigrant imagination in multicultural Canada. As Gregory Younging of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation summarised in Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples:

Indigenous Peoples think of Creation as something that includes and sustains all living things. People are part of it and responsible for caring for it. The question of “who owns it” has no context. By contrast, “who owns it” preoccupies European notions of the world. Consider, for example, that every bit of land in what is now Canada has some sort of ownership designation. Individuals own it, or corporations own it, or towns, or the Crown, and so on (2018, p. 25).

Though today’s newcomers to Canada seem more eager than previous generations to understand Indigenous histories and relationships to the land, when it comes to land as property, more could be done so ordinary inhabitants of this country – as well as the real estate industry – better understand the inseparability of land and language for Indigenous peoples and it's relationship to pressing social issues that touch all of us.  Fundamentally, we need to ask ourselves where our commitments lay – with the commodification of ‘knowledge’ for knowledge (or our own) sake or with the relationships through which we come to know and come to be in the world (by learning through our actions/doing in environments including but not limited to people). Wilson argued that viewing knowledge as relational necessitates “relational accountability or being accountable to all my relations” (original italics) (p. 177). Yet, in many research accounts claiming relational approaches or ontologies, human interpersonal relationships remain the focus – often seen from a harmonious starting point. I was struck by this point during one of the first StOries sessions, when we took turns sharing one word that could encapsulate the meaning of “home” to each of us. As we went around the circle, I grew increasingly aware that the word I selected – ‘conflict’ – stood in stark contrast to the other words that were being shared, words like ‘relationship’, ‘connectedness’, ‘belonging’.

Later as I struggled through writing my story this anthology, an issue that troubled me was how my father’s pursuit of property ownership had little to do with what (I believe) my father had truly wanted – a sense of connectedness with something greater than himself – with life or creation itself, in the sense of something greater than ourselves, as well as his role in world-making. Re-thinking my own sense of self with this in mind, who and what I feel a part of (belong to) suddenly becomes clearer. It includes my relatives, alive and deceased, but also my childhood playhouse; the plants and garden I tend; the oceans and rolling hills of my parents’ of my grandparents’ homelands; and the clay pot my cousin was determined to give me; not to mention, the sounds of my family’s languages – more than just ways of communicating – since the structure of these languages also limits expression of some of my critiques and protestations – but the sounds of healing and music. My sense of home. And a sense of my interrelatedness, my relational self, that grew deeper through the process of writing and sharing our stories.

New approaches to inquiry in academic contexts are attempting to grapple with these tensions and paradoxes, for example the theoretical approaches of new materialism, posthumanism, and postqualitative research. Feminist critiques of humanism are not new (see Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016) but are now making their way into the consciousness of health and allied health professionals (e.g., Shaw, 2022). Given the way definitions of ‘human’ dominate our interpretations of human behaviour, such critiques have important relevance to the field of migration studies.

Feminist and physicist Karen Barad is a key name in the posthuman literature for drawing on quantum physics to develop what she called agential realism, which shifted attention from interactional approaches to relationship to seeing how differences emerge from what she calls intra-actions (Barad, 2007). What is important about Barad’s work is the way it undermines taken for ways of thinking that rest on presumed binaries. As Carol Taylor explains, these approaches:

begin with a different view – that of the human-in-relation as co-constituted by non-human materialities (brick, glass, stone. wood, paper, plastics, flour, sand, trash, for example) and earthly others (animals, plants, the sea, sky, wind, rain, trees, soil, insects, viruses, bacteria, for example) which materialise in assemblages which are continually shifting, mutating and changing. These non-human assemblages presume different understandings of what matters. By replacing the singular figure of humanism (‘Man’) by a more plural understanding centred on human-nonhuman relationality, FNMPHPQ approaches enact and make possible research and pedagogy endeavors which produce knowledge differently (Taylor, 2021, p. 23).

It is not my intention to claim that the StOries project was led by such an approach. Nor do I argue that such approaches hold all answers – and indeed the voices of Indigenous People and children have typically been left out of this literature (Murris, 2021b). What is at stake at a deeper level is our understanding of the human self. Gergen understood this, arguing that “the very idea of a private mind is a cultural construction. In effect, it is out of the relational process that all meaning emerges” (2015, p. 155). However, Gergen was speaking primarily about interpersonal relationships, which begs the question of what it is meant by ‘relational paradigm’. Moreover, in the aftermath of COVID-19 which has included many human-made catastrophes (like climate crisis, war, food and housing insecurity), relational humanism seems an insufficient response to what is truly needed in the world.

Indeed, what began in the StOries project as a concern about intersectional (individual) identities and lived experiences – of belonging or un-belonging as it were – transformed through writing into (for many of us) a collective sense of community and responsibility and, in some cases, a new sense of freedom (including, perhaps, from the individualised self). Regardless, this possibility raises potentially new or revised questions about the value of storytelling as well as the ontology of migrants within migration literature and scholarship. For as Karin Murris contends: “A relational ontology is more than just acknowledging that things are always in relation. The ontological re-turn is also literally about movement. Critical posthumanism changes the meaning of ontology from the philosophical study of ‘being’ (onto) to ‘becoming’” (p. 70). In terms of the StOries project this could on one level mean that we read the stories shared not in terms of who the authors are but who they become through the process, as well as the stories themselves as a kind of becoming:

Stories, we are told, have a start, a middle and an end. But I have come to believe that they are not necessarily in that order. As I was penning down my immigration story, it became my COVID story. That seemed like the most natural thing for me to write about since attempting to move and finally moving to Canada was the biggest thing that happened to me during the pandemic. I am aware that having an immigration story as my pandemic story is, in the least, a privilege. Here I am not undermining the difficulty of my experiences but reflecting on them in relation to other stories I have encountered. However, as I attempted to frame my experiences through language and narratives, some aspects of my story were blurred and needed to be re-examined and others gained new meanings and perspectives. My story did not change over time but the events in it started to mean different things than they did at the time of their occurrence (Nabila Kazmi, April 20, 2022).

Nabila’s description about her story’s becoming raises some important points, both about the interrelatedness of stories (and storytellers) but also about the nature of meaning as a becoming process – of her migration story becoming her COVID story (and her related positionality). This could of course go both ways: for a made up but plausible example, one’s ‘coming out’ story could become their migration story or vice versa. The meaning of stories can also take on different lines of trajectory – so a COVID story could become a migration story could become a ‘coming out’ story. In the final segment of this chapter, I circle back to the quote by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the beginning of this chapter, and his claim that: “To write is also to become something other than a writer, “(Deleuze, 1993/1997, p. 6). In the last section of this chapter, I draw examples from what we might call sensory or arts-based activities that we engaged in during this project, as a way to illustrate the ways we became as beings-in-relation through this process of sharing stories.

4 Becoming Authors, Becoming Vocal: Reflections from the StOries Project

The reading and writing activities employed during the StOries project aimed to elicit evocative memory and personal narratives in response to critical readings on topics such as intersectionality, racism, and Canadian multiculturalism. A key way we did so, and how the StOries methodology developed over the course of the project, was through participants’ spontaneous and intentional engagement with multisensory and creative (visual, aural) methods as a way to stimulate memory and generate or centre their writing. Some of these activities were peer-led, whereby a smaller group of participants collaborated to present certain concepts or content to the larger group. There is not room here to summarise all the activities we engaged in, so I wish to share two very specific peer-led sessions.

In the first activity StOries participants were invited to become curious about the relationships between words, sounds, and the material world. The peer group leading this created a short presentation about ‘sensory words’. To get participants thinking about words that might describe or invoke the senses, we provided three of our own: petrichor (a smell), gossamer (which invokes a feathery texture), and phosphene (a spot of light). These words and their full definitions were presented along with evocative images to represent their meaning. We asked in advance for participants to share words on a google doc from whatever language they could think of, words that either represented sounds that liked and that were not easy to replicate, or words whose sounds invoked a pleasant sensory experience. Participants could include links to images that represent the word, or to audio of the sound(s) that the word describes. This generated rich discussion about the role of language in telling their stories about migration and multiculturalism, and included words like: warahoon (Caribbean slang for a wild person who is spontaneous or a person with a wild hairdo); ihsaan (an Arabic word that cannot be easily translated which indicates generosity, excellence, and beautification in interactions with others); arrebol (Spanish for the red color reflected on the clouds when illuminated by the sun); and chipak (hugging, clinging, to stick to someone/or something). What came out of this discussion was more than simply a sense of being lost in translation; it was the sense that words matter in more ways than just human-centred communicative meaning- they translate meaning, too, between objects and organisms, and so mean something quite literally to our bodies as well.

In the second activity, we asked participants to submit an image of a meaningful object in advance of regular on-line group session, something that spoke directly or indirectly to their migration story, such as their sense of home or belonging/unbelonging. Co-facilitated by myself and Alka Kumar, we called this our ‘meaningful objects activity’ and so the focus was more on the object than the photograph. In addition to asking participants to submit an image of a meaningful object, StOries participants were asked to title the object and to write one to two hundred words explaining why this object is meaningful. Prior to class we collated images, titles, and captions into a powerpoint presentation (one image and caption per slide) and then during the session we went through a kind of sharing circle where each person was invited to speak to their individual slide/image and either read their caption or say a few words about it, adding opportunities for multiple layers of meaning making.

The meaningful objects activity took inspiration from a research paper by Cox and Guillemin (2018) who discussed the methodological potential of for eliciting memory and emotion through the senses by including object engagement in qualitative research. This activity ended up being quite pivotal in the development of relationships between many members of the StOries project, and served also to generate meaningful micro-narratives that for some would become part of their final story contributions. My hope is that by presenting these below we might start to view people who migrate not merely in terms of individual identity – but cosmologically and ethically as beings-in-relation.

4.1 Our Meaningful Objects

First and foremost, a great number of participants chose artefacts that were gifts from family or friends, sometimes passed down through generations. Gifts such as a wall decoration with an Arabic inscription and an engraved spatula signified relationships with God and other faith communities (Bibi Babksh), friendship (Brianna Jennings), and our own personal becoming (Jenny Osorio, Chelsea Richards James). Everyday objects such as a small toy or an ashtray can act as ‘home’ in another place, a landscape one no longer connects with physically (Nabila Kasmi, Negin Javaher). Connecting people with place, the objects activate emotional states (Karen Young) and carry stories of the past (Alka Kumar). Some objects may convey a sense of uprootedness and urgency, blurring the objects’ stories with our own (Ozlem Atar). At the same time we are reminded by the act of photographing that the object only captures fragments of what these objects mean, and what they do, in our lives (Chelsea Richards James).

These connections between people (living and non-living), place, and objects are dynamic. Perhaps ironically, though in English we think of these artefacts as our “possessions”, the contemplations below indicate that in many ways these objects and artefacts, through our entangled relationships, become as much a part of us as we become part of them – thus serving as reminders of who we are (Thábata de Azevedo Xavier da Costa). Yet they elicit not only memory of individual people and places – as when a telephone desk or a clay bowl become a proxy for both a deceased relative and one’s ties to the past (Sadaf Rezakhan Khajeh, Natasha Damiano) – but also historical memory – such as the paradoxical image of the Two China’s (Owen Guo) and the tea cups signifying camaraderie during oppression (Esra Ari). They may personify all that we wish we were or imagine we could become (Arunkumar Javel), or give us direction in our daily practices (Galina Liou). As physical representations of our embodied memories, they help us honour those we have lost (Christian Hui), though we may also feel at once haunted and comforted by the memories they elicit (Melanie Zuzarte). As storied through the objects presented below, matter that means something (Barad, 2007) can become extensions of ourselves, not only symbolizing strength stemming from emotional solidarity as well as a sense of resistance and resiliency.

Below are the titles, images, and captions that participants generated, arranged to tell a story about the ways objects and artefacts might mediate our relational entanglements. My purpose in sharing the descriptions is to demonstrate the way objects and artefacts (including photographs) can mediate the relationships central to our migration stories – with people, place, spirit (and imagination), and across place and time. It is also a way to disrupt the standard conventions of academic biographies comprising an alphabet soup of titles, letters, and institutional affiliations. Through these objects, we share with the readers a deeper sense of who the writers of this anthology are and a more relational sense of their deeper motivations for engaging in such a project.

Reflecting Roots (photo and caption by Bibi Baksh)

My object… is a wall decoration made from the finest Indian teak, gifted to me from an Indian Christian colleague in 2005 after he came back from a trip to India. He said that it is a common piece in the doorway/entrance area in Muslim homes in India. The Arabic words on it is loosely translated as: “This is from the bounty of my Lord”. It is significant for three reasons: it reflects my relationship with God; it speaks to my relationship with peoples of other faiths; and it came from the country that my grandfather grew up in – I imagine he could have planted that tree as a boy!

“Thank you, Brianna” (photo and caption by Brianna Jennings)

This object is a gift given to me by one of my former students and now friend. It is a spatula used to make okonomiyaki – the regional dish of Hiroshima. Inscribed on the spatula is “Thank you Brianna”. She gave this to me when I was about to leave Japan after living and working there for 2 years. It’s one of the most kind and thoughtful gifts I have ever received. It connects me back to a place and time that I cherish. I feel very lucky to have met this student and to have stayed in touch all these years.

A Winter Scene (photo and caption by Jenny Osorio)

I started this cross-stitch piece when I was thirteen years old as part of the Arts and Crafts class at school. A winter scene in which mama bear and baby bear contemplate a supermoon. I remember my mother telling me that the project was too big and that I should choose something smaller to submit. I didn’t complete the piece and left it abandoned. Last year, I received my mother’s collection of cross-stitch fabrics, threads and projects. She had kept my unfinished embroidery all these years. Curious enough, I had kept the pattern in an old book. I looked at the piece thinking little did I know then that I would be living in Winterland one day.

I got myself to work and finished the winter scene 20 years later. It now adorns the gallery wall of my son’s bedroom.

35 mm Film Camera (photo and caption by Chelsea Nyomi Richards)

This is a film camera from the 1980s that captures images in 35 mm format. The camera was gifted to me from my mother in 2016 after I expressed interest in learning photography. I began making images with it during the summer of 2017, after learning how to use a DLSR through volunteering with an on-campus media company during the third year of my undergrad. This camera is symbolic of the first steps that I took when deciding to pursue a career in the arts, as opposed to my previous plans of becoming a medical doctor upon completion of my bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences. I was fascinated by the camera and its ability to capture fragments of the peaceful moments that I was dwelling in. I continued to explore photography for a few months, using this film camera, a DSLR, and a mini polaroid before I decided to study the world of television and videography.

Casa Carioca (image and caption by Thábata de Azevedo Xavier da Costa)

I came to Canada with two suitcases. Mostly clothes, nothing else. The idea was to build a new life, and a new life needed new stuff. To some extent, at the beginning, stuff was not important. Little by little I began to feel the need to remind myself of who I was by filling my place with things that represented Brazil or that we found on vacation whenever we left Canada to continue to explore the world. The item in the picture is a piece of art and possibly the item in my apartment that brings me the most joy. It represents my identity in a way that is hard to explain, especially considering that this is not a piece that culturally represents the part of Brazil that I’m from – and yet, it’s so Brazil. When I was a child, my mom brought to our home similar pieces of art. I never liked them, maybe because they were not perfect enough. Now, not being perfect, is what makes them so special. To messy lives and weird little people – all full of color.

Playing With Memories (photo and caption by Nabila Kazmi)

I chose this object [a miniature toy horse made of green fabric and wrapped in gold ribbon] because it belongs to my 5 year old nephew and reminds me of the time I spent with him last year which helped me keep my sanity during COVID times. Also it is representative of the land I come from.

Cigarette Ashtray (photo and caption by Negin Saheb Javaher)

Something from “my home” for the “home” that I now live in and is mine [picture of carved wooden ashtray on stand].

Figa Amethyst Charm (photo and caption by Karen Young)

This figa is made of amethyst and gold. As someone who is not really into jewelry or would go out of my way to buy jewelry and further support extractive industries, I find that I gravitate towards this charm when I’m feeling less at ease that day. It is significant to me because I feel calmness whenever I wear it. At a birthday party, where the memo was to wear anything but purple and gold, the birthday person shared with us how amethyst and gold offer soothing powers. Somehow, even after dedicating to their wish to avoid wearing purple and gold clothing. I found myself wearing this necklace to the birthday party after I saw that one of the daughters of the birthday person had seen me wearing it.

‘For whom the bell tolls’ (photo and caption by Alka Kumar, quoting Ernest Hemingway)

I got these antique brass bells nearly twenty-five years ago at an open-air market in India, in my home city, Delhi. They lived in my parental home when my mother was breathing her last, and they have travelled with me across oceans, occupying pride of place in the many homes I created with my own little family. Back in the spring, during our twisted pandemic times, I would see this scene from my office window each time I looked up from my work. These bells carrying stories from my past, now hung in my balcony while my backyard crab apple blossomed in all its beauty. The bells connect the dots between `me then’ and `me now,’ signifying continuity, calm, and a sense of grounding. Somehow, they remind me to be grateful, and to always do my best.

Pebble Tumblings/Ramblings (photo and caption by Ozlem Atar)

The object I chose is a family of three pebbles: my creative muses. They had been sitting silently in my suitcase for years when I found them in the winter of 2019 while looking for another precious object I had lost. I had uprooted the rocks from a coast in Western Turkey long ago, and unknowingly, smuggled them into Canada in August 2018. The rocks have their special corner on my desk, from where they cast me hurt glances for years of negligence. They urge me to tell their story: a tale about occupying the precarious edge of visibility and invisibility as well as that of inertness and mobility. I fantasize writing an epistolatory short story or novella about a pebble in deep time.

Telephone Desk (photo and caption by Sadaf Rezakhan Khajeh)

The telephone desk was in our household since before I was born. When I was ten we moved, and the desk found a new home in my grandmother’s apartment. I remember watching home videos of my two year old self, standing on the telephone desk, dialing the phone and calling out every family member’s name. After we moved, whenever we went to my grandmother’s place, I would sit by the desk and play with the orange rotary dial phone that actually still worked. I would dial every number I knew which was our own home number and my grandmother’s number. One of my most vivid memories is of my grandmother sitting on that desk and using that rotary dial phone. The details of how her fingers moved so quickly to dial the phone and the sound the dialing wheel made every time she released it at the finger stop are still with me. After my grandmother passed away, I begged my mom to keep the desk and I kept the phone myself. I can’t really take the desk back to Canada with me and now that I am here in Tehran, as I sit on it, it feels so much smaller compared to my body.

Willful Connections (photo and caption by Natasha Damiano)

This clay bowl may be around one hundred years old or more. I have had it since 2001 when I took a trip to my father’s hometown. The bowl was one among many still remaining in the tiny house my grandfather grew up in. It was given to me by the son of my father’s first cousin, who I have a close bond with. He hid it under a jacket and gave it to me as a keepsake, concerned that older relatives would refuse to share it if we had asked. This act of defiance signified our relationship and his understanding of my deep connection to that place and the memory of my grandfather. Now it houses the stones I have collected from other memorable places and moments in my life.

Keychain from my papa (photo and caption by Sarah Ostapchuck)

This keychain was given to me by my grandfather (whom I’ve always called papa) years before I was able to drive a car. I want to say maybe when I was about twelve. I honestly don’t remember when or where or even why he gave it to me. I just remember him giving it to me and saying specifically that it was meant for my car key ring when I had my own car one day. My papa was a driving instructor (among many other things). He taught my mom, her older sister, me, my older sister, and my younger cousin how to drive. I always knew him as a kind and soft papa, but when I got behind the wheel and he in the passenger seat, he turned into a drill sergeant. There may have been tears, but there were also many successful driving tests. The keychain is made of glass, I think, with a foam-like fish inside to symbolize Christianity. He was a major patriarchal figure in my family and led us all in our faith. Though he is gone now, I still look to his example of how to live a Christ-like, selfless life, and I can’t bring myself to put the keychain on my car key ring now for fear of it breaking. Instead, it hangs on a hook in my bathroom.

Granby Zoo, 1979 (photo and caption by Melanie Zuzarte)

The attached photograph was taken in Montreal, Quebec in 1979. I was with my sisters and my Mom at Granby Zoo. I was 5 years old in this picture and wearing an ‘Enfant Terrible’ tee. I remember it being one of my favourite t-shirts to wear. We would move from Montreal to Toronto the following year. My Dad took this photo as he did most photos. I wonder why it was important for him to document our lives in Canada as a new immigrant. I was half smiling in this photograph, which means that I was worried. I was often worried as a little one. I would often think about what my parents were thinking, feeling, and how they engaged with one another. Yes, even at 5. Even though my Dad was documenting our family’s journey, he also was documenting my inner child’s reflexivity.

If I were to visit Granby Zoo today with a Cracker Jack box in hand, would the ghosts from the past keep me company?

Turkish Tea Glasses (photo and caption by Esra Ari)

The first picture on the left is one of the Turkish teacups I have. This reminds me warmth, my family, my friends, and food back home. Waking up in the morning, the first thing you do is brewing the tea for breakfast. This is how a day starts in most of the houses in Turkey. After the long classes at the university, we were not immediately walking out of the class as if we had a very important meeting to attend. Our classes were not fun. Indeed, the content of the classes was disturbing. We were just taking the time to relax or to digest… The end of the classes was time for tea and long chats with friends, sometimes with tears in the eyes and sometimes with laughter on our faces.

The Book of Life (photo and caption by Arunkumar Rajavel)

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes book collection is the most meaningful object in my life. Calvin symbolises everything I have lost: the childhood that I never had, the fun I didn’t know existed, the approach to life that I wish I took. Calvin is a personification of everything I longed to be, everything I wish I were. If I could time travel and become my younger self again, I’d try to be as bratty and as innocent; and if given a chance at childhood again, I’d try to be as free and as daring. This book changed my outlook on life. If I’m sad, happy, excited, nervous, anxious, etc., this is the first place I’d go to to find solace, strength, and comfort. Naturally, this is the one thing that I chose to take with me when I moved abroad.”

Medicine Buddha (photo and caption by Galina Liou)

My meaningful object is the Medicine Buddha statue gifted by the Monk as a birthday present in 2019, the first year when I moved to Prince Edward Island from Taiwan. The Monk knew that I have been reciting The Sutra of The Medicine Buddha weekly. I suppose he wanted to encourage me to keep on reciting and learning dharma, therefore he regifted me the statue, as the monks do not keep personal possessions besides those obligatory and authorized things. I felt so blessed and blissful when I was handed the statue. I will keep reciting the Sutra of The Medicine Buddha, praying for true happiness and peace for all beings.

The Black Suede Shoes from Derek (photo and caption by Christian Hui)

As I reflected on the black suede shoes my mentor Derek had gifted me, I felt a sense of love, joy and camaraderie evoked by the memory of a dear friend. The black suede shoes were not new, but slightly worn bargain finds that had been kept in almost pristine conditions. The patterns lightly etched on the suede leather exuded a refined elegance, while the small silver buttons gave the footwear a flashy call for attention. When I learned Derek had passed, I immediately searched for the shoes and placed them on my altar. To honour Derek’s legacy, I dressed up on the day of the community memorial, and made sure my feet were wrapped around by the precious black suede shoes he left me.

5 An Ending That’s Still Becoming…

It’s difficult to end a story whose ending is not yet clear. My purpose for showing the examples from the activities, and for being reflexive about how the chapter came into being, was also to highlight this anthology as a work in progress. As anthropologist Laura Nader (2011) commented in her essay about the relationship between theory and method in ethnography, we are all “caught in [our] culture much as the people [we] study”. Because of our embeddedness in the very culture we attempted to critique through our written (and non-written) reflections and discussions, we co-created in the StOries project new understandings of ourselves, individually, and in relation to each other and that which matters to us. This does not mean we have overcome what we have attempted here to critique, but we have edged our way forward together, our strengths becoming clearest perhaps at the points at which we have diverged (from one another or our stories). For example, as I wrote this chapter, I kept thinking of the ending of my own story and how maybe already, even before publication, I would write it slightly differently. My own shift of focus from belonging to becoming also raised questions for me about how our cultural notions of belonging translate into ‘common sense’ assumptions that show up in mental health policies, systems and structures intended to support people who are marginalized (by normative sexist, racist, transphobic, ableist, and humancentric bias) and who also experience significant or severe distress.

Our engagement with the material and sensory world as a way to remember that which we already and always have embodied became increasingly important to both our collective understandings (‘relational knowledge’) and our ongoing relations. In this process, some of us have become authors for the first time; others have become more vocal about their identities and lived experiences; and others still have healed longstanding wounds, often rooted in family or migration or both. In the months that have followed the writing of these stories, some of us have continued to work with one another, developing workshops and presentations, and collaborating on the writing and editing of the additional chapters of this anthology. Others have moved on to new projects, academic programs, jobs and houses, or new stages of life however ordinary or extraordinary. Some participants have been touched and exhausted by politics from their homeland as they struggle to continue working or studying while also supporting loved ones and political actions. Others have dealt with their own personal health, or the health and even loss of relatives, child and/or elder care, and travels ‘home’ and back again. In other words, life has unfolded, as it does, and not in ways that are linear, predictable, bringing both joy and suffering.

I began this chapter with my ponderings of why ‘fieldnotes’ were not the appropriate metaphor for a critical discussion of the processes behind the stories generated, shared, and finally written down and collated into this anthology. Many questions motivated my reconceptualization of the chapter. Why did we write the ‘fieldnotes’ as we did? What does it say about the common sense ways that we understand ethnography (outside of anthropology)? What do these reflections actually reveal, and what is elided when framing them in this way? By showing and telling about the activities we engaged in throughout the StOries process, the goal of this chapter – and indeed this project – was also to bring these migrations stories into conversation with Indigenous scholarship that has long held the value of stories as relational knowledge. This is only a tiny first step of what we might continue to create in future. The purpose of this chapter is to caution readers as well to the need to be attentive to the ethics of engaging responsibly in storywork (Archibald, 2008), especially if we do so in the name of decolonization and Indigenization of research and related practices. What we do with stories matters if we are to heed their wisdom for the greater good of all of our relations. Will we listen? And then?

Appendix

Writing prompts for ‘Fieldnotes’chapter

• Who was your inspiration?

• Did you already know what you wanted to write about, or did you change your mind later? Did you discover what you wanted to write about at the last minute?

• Were there any specific writing prompts, topics/themes discussed in workshops, or reading material covered that gave you ideas for your last piece or inspired you?

• Was there a life event or a lifelong experience that led up to the writing of this piece for you?

• Was there a pivotal moment that influenced your writing?

• What have you learned about yourself and about your interactions with others?