Storying Otherwise: A Hub for Creative Ethnographic Writing
Storying otherwise stems from the promise of creative writing to expand our imaginations and horizons of the possible. Crises of many kinds call upon anthropologists and other social science and humanities scholars to imagine possibilities of remade worlds, and to make our research-related writing-of-the-otherwise accessible and public.
The Storying Otherwise Hub for Creative Ethnographic Writing is a collaboration between Sue Frohlick and Laura Meek. Their core objectives in creating the Hub, funded by a 2024-2025 UBC Okanagan Public Humanities Incubator Grant, are:
- to collaborate with other creative ethnographic writers to advance their own and others’ storying otherwise potential; and,
- to move their research into public spheres in dialogue with other writers and makers who share a commitment to worlds ‘otherwise.’
The Storying Otherwise Hub was inspired by the excitement and enthusiastic participation of our colleagues in a series of four roundtables we convened for the 2023 Joint Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society. At this international conference held in Toronto, our Call for Papers attracted submissions from over 60 emerging and established scholars from all over Canada, the US, Latin America, the UK, Europe, and Asia. We initiated this Hub to further advance the generation of a national and international network for public creative ethnographic writing. Our current collaborators include anthropologists from around the world as well as scholars working in sociology, gender studies, geography, cultural studies, environmental humanities, disaster studies, sound studies, global health, ethnomusicology, science and technology studies, performance studies, and beyond. We welcome those interested in joining us to attend our forthcoming events (details below).
Meet the Co-Directors
Sue Frohlick
Sue Frohlick is a Professor in the Department of Community,
Culture, and Global Studies. She is an Anglo-settler of Norwegian, German, and English ancestry. A cultural anthropologist, her research explores intersections of tourism with reproduction, transnational intimacies, and sexual subjectivities, and, most currently, with the politics of sound and space. Her book, Bloom Spaces: Reproduction and Tourism on the Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica, published by the University of Toronto Press Teaching Culture Series in 2024, is her first entry into creative ethnographic writing, a means to tell a story about a sensitive topic in an accessible way for a broad audience. She has also written on “listening otherwise” in critical tourism studies.
Sue’s community-based research in Winnipeg looks at relationality for African immigrant and refugee youth as they navigated life as newcomers. In collaboration with community members, Tsion Zebene and Adey Mohamed, they are creating a graphic ethnography Vitalities of Settlement. Through comic book format the book will depict the vitalities in the youths’ lives and everyday processes of settlement they experienced, punctuated with anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism and surveillance, as they inhabited spaces of whiteness and a dominant “multicultural” ethos. Sue’s interest in storying otherwise is to align creative ethnographic writing with feminist, queer, anticolonial, and radical ethics of care approaches to writing for the possibilities of remaking worlds. She is a late bloomer into this field, and grateful for the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to, the burgeoning number of anthropologists working on “otherwise” forms of telling stories differently.
Laura Meek
Laura Meek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Community, Culture, and Global Studies. She is an Anglo-settler of mixed European ancestry. A cultural and medical anthropologist, Laura’s research centers around fugitive science, embodied knowledge, and the politics of health and medicine in East Africa. In writing about medical practices which often involve the agency of ancestors, witchcraft, God, jinn, and other beings, she has found inspiration in calls to “fictionalize anthropology,” which she takes to mean the subversive refusal of the neo/colonial epistemological and ontological grounds upon which hegemonic distinctions between truth and fiction have been produced. Her interest in writing otherwise thus stems from a commitment to telling the “untellable story,” the story which, to be told, requires the creation of new categories of tellability.
Laura’s first short story, “Azizi,” received an award for Creative Ethnographic Prose from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and was published in Anthropology and Humanism. Her article, “Otherwise,” co-authored with cultural studies scholar Julia Morales Fontanilla, explores the “otherwise” as a concept, analytic, method, and ethico-onto-political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. Published in Feminist Anthropology, the piece proposes a series of specific practices for writing otherwise, including: attunement to the politics of the mundane; speculative co-laboring as a form of care; the fracturing of anthropological epistemologies; writing as a “complex we”; and not (always) knowing. These approaches were foregrounded in a special issue that Laura co-edited with geographer Abigail Neely in Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The collection, entitled “Beyond the Limits,” draws on disqualified types of knowledge and minor practices to demand a rethinking of biomedical limits in pursuit of more expansive visions of health, care, cure, ethics, and healing. Each of these projects represents different strands of Dr. Meek’s approach to storying otherwise.
UpComing EVENTS
In October 2024, we will run an experiential workshop on the praxis of Storying Otherwise. Co-hosted with cultural studies scholar Julia Morales Fontanilla (Santa Clara University), this workshop will explore a set of concerns that are the undercurrent of writing otherwise. This includes a political commitment to more equitable worlds, but it also requires a very hands-on practice, a methodological intervention into how we produce the “deliverables” of academic research. This workshop will reveal how the act of making an account is not just a neutral or objective description of a situation but is also a moment of bringing into being the relations that constitute that situation. Therefore, to write in a way that can transform our current world and its many crises, we must learn to give accounts that are not the usual description or the usual way of making meaning. Participants will practice doing this in relation to their own respective research projects.
In March 2025, we are planning a two-day event as the culmination of our UBC Okanagan Public Humanities Incubator project. This event will include public readings of our work, seminars to workshop drafts, and more. Stay tuned for further details forthcoming!
PAST EVENTS
In October 2023, we launched the Storying Otherwise Hub by hosting a public webinar featuring Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University) and Megan Raschig (California State University), two leading figures in the North American creative ethnographic writing space.
This event recognized that our current moment of multiple crises and social, political, economic, and environmental upheavals calls upon anthropologists (and others) to imagine creative possibilities of worlds remade. And, to be part of such change-making, we must ensure that our research is accessible to non-academic audiences. For these reasons, creative ethnographic writing is quickly becoming an essential genre for today’s anthropology. But creative writing is a skill that must be honed and practiced; it comes with challenges beyond the social science writing in which we were trained. At this inaugural event, Dr. Culhane and Dr. Raschig shared insights from their own experimental writing practices, including advice for how to harness the power of stories as interventions with worldmaking potential.
This virtual public workshop was open to anyone interested in the intersections of anthropology, creative writing, and social justice. You can listen to a free two-part podcast that the Hub created from this webinar here.
Throughout the 2023-24 academic year, the Storying Otherwise Hub hosted a series of “Spark Ups,” informal online gatherings open to everyone interested in creative ethnographic writing. We used these sessions to share resources, brainstorm collaborations, discuss challenges, and expand our international network of creative ethnographic writers.
Our final “Spark Up: Sparking Creative Ethnographic Writing” event was held in April 2024 and featured cultural anthropologist Lauren Miller (Texas Tech University), who talked about the process of writing a creative adventure ethnography. She also presented a reading from her current book project, Thrown Out: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Ethnographic Novel.
Dr. Miller was motivated to write a fictionalized account because the stories of gender-based harassment and sexual assault that she encountered in her research were extremely personal and she worried about the unintended consequences her interlocutors might face if these stories were traced back to them. Her presentation facilitated an important discussion around the ethics of different kinds of writing practices, and how to fulfill our ethical obligations to our interlocutors (or “research subjects”) beyond those required by institutional ethics review boards. Among the many topics discussed, we considered how fiction presents new ethical challenges in terms of navigating positionality and representation.
CONTACT US
Contact us at sue.frohlick@ubc.ca and laura.meek@ubc.ca. Please send your email to both of us and kindly include Storying Otherwise Hub in the subject line.