Diffracting Bag Lady Stories and Kinship: Cartogra-ph-ying and Making-With Others in MoreThan-Human Affirmative Spaces

Abstract

Underpinned by Le Guin’s (2019) conceptualisation of bag ladies along with feminist materialism and posthumanist ways of thinking and doing, the authors examine the ways in which their bag lady storytelling became entwined with an online reading and ultimately kinship.

These are our stories: Children’s more-than-human encounters with migration in Global South and North contexts

“…The children quickly ‘got into character’ and started thinking about their environment through the eyes of their objects – seeing, hearing, doing, having their own life. This led to the crafting of new ways of knowing (Latto et al, 2022) and understandings of childhood in the context of more-than-human kinship. The stories as such belong to the children but they are co-produced with the objects.…”

“…The drawings produced by children acted as a social process of developing stories about their objects and thus their experiences. The drawings ended up being performative, wrapped in conversation (Thompson, 2017), a process to think-with and make-with (Latto et al, 2022). Involving the artists meant reducing barriers to participation but also developing commonalities in how the children engaged with the project and developed their stories as a shared social process and more-than-human kinship.…”

“…We adopt a more-than-human perspective in thinking about children’s entanglement and kinship with the objects. We draw on Haraway’s ‘bag lady’ storytelling as speculative fabulation where developing stories and understandings of the more-than-human world makes kin (Latto et al, 2022).…”