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We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurable, and at times hilarious. Here we share some of our work and some of our thinking about why it matters.

This performative piece, an enactment of lived feminism, acknowledges the privileges and explores the similarities and differences between three cis-gendered white women in different parts of the United Kingdom and how these aid and hinder collaboratively writing together. The piece was shared at the Autoethnography Special Interest Group at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in 2018. We had never written together before but had presented on the same Shame? panel at ICQI in 2017 convened by Alys Mendus that also included papers by Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris and a memorial to Sue Porter. There were similarities in terms of themes explored including sexuality and taboo. This was our starting point but it was not easy. We realized that difficulty within collaborative inquiry is rarely written about and published but is often the topic of conversation between academics. Perhaps feminism is our ability to stand together curious and alive to our nonshared experience with a commitment to not creating a shared perspective? To stay standing together, we could be stronger in these troubling times.

If activism is an act of challenging marginalization and hierarchy, The Bodies Collective works to challenge the hierarchy between “mind” and “body” inherent in much academic discourse, and can be witnessed in the conference space. We do this, not through forming another hierarchical structure, but from within—through invitation and inviting those who may be labeled as “participant” to become a leader within each workshop presented. This is the act of activism that The 2019 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI19) invited. In this article, we discuss how The Bodies Collective’s contributions to ECQI can be seen as activism. We describe our contribution, a workshop, and provide examples of feedback from those involved. Finally, we show some of the challenges we have encountered and conclude with looking toward the future.

The article introduces the concept of the “intertwangle,” a concept grounded within the gentle collisions of delegates at the 13th International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois and the simultaneous retelling of multiple autoethnographies of such encounters. Through such encounters and “retellings,” perhaps a different way of thinking about autoethnography is developed. The article presents a story of a journey to and through the 13th Congress. A journey of no answers and no certainty—this journey is not a collaborative sharing of data but more of the gentle collisions and the recounting of different stories located within shared experiences. It is a simple journey bounded by way-markers of uncertainty, at times self-deprecation, loss, and death. It is a journey of new beginnings, of no ends—of uncertainty rather than certainty, revealing rather than obscuring and expanding rather than reducing.

(2019). Running with scissors in Business Management Education. A collaborative autoethnography on designing pedagogical interventions with an art-maker and an academic skills tutor. The Design Journal: Vol. 22, Running with Scissors: 13th International Conference of the European Academy of Design, Dundee, 10-12th April, 2019, edited by Louise Valentine, Joanna Bletcher and Leon Cruickshank, pp. 1499-1514.

This paper argues that through participation, dialogue, co-action and the occurrence of immersive experiences, as suggested by Kester (2011), key elements of the research process, relationship, and friendship deepen and are enriched by engaging with absence and presence as part of a chosen activity and bodily experience. The following narrative explores how the production of visual artwork and co-created ritual experience in a chosen landscape weaves a gossamer safety net across the chasm of loss and raises questions of absence and presence, personal loss and the collaborative shared experience; the power of ritual, conversation, and object-making give attention to the presence of absence. My argument builds on the notion of presence, manifest absence and Otherness (Law, 2004, pp. 84-85) and extends the ideas that absence can be located in space and have materiality and agency (Meyer & Woodthorpe, 2008).

This layered account of an inquiry into ‘red’ emerged out of a collective biography workshop. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered together to write and make other things and marks on paper that asked questions of, and into, the spaces between words, people, things and their environments. We did not set out to workshop or write into or paint ‘red’ but, rather, it was red that slipped in, uninvited, and painted and wrote us. Red arose as a blush or a stain seeping amongst us that became referenced obliquely by material objects, metaphors and fairytales. The stain spread, became noticeable through our weekend together and beyond it, creating another (bright red artery) vein of connection to write with.