Carrying stories: Digital storytelling and the complexities of intimacy, relationality, and home spaces

Abstract

Over the past decade, we have worked alongside storytellers to bring their stories into the world. These encounters have been challenging, exciting, and intimate. In this paper, we reflect on a digital/multimedia storytelling project in which we engaged with people who have experienced weight stigma in fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood care. We use the metaphors of story midwifery and surrogacy to describe the methodological-substantive interplay between what we do, how we do it, and what emerges in this (un)doing. In this reflexive and methodological paper, we engage with the affect and relationality of doing storywork. We reflect on and theorize around embeddedness, othering, belonging, power, shame, and joy in research encounters. Pragmatically, we consider how relational ethics combine with exhaustion and logistical challenges. Finally, we explore the tensions inherent to (co)producing stories at the boundaries of neoliberal academic temporalities and structures.