Straining the conventional seams: Doll-making as a methodology for exploring the unspeakable – Responses to the Pierre Rivière texts

Abstract

This paper gives an account of a doll-making workshop, held as part of a collaborative project at the University of Bristol in 2010, which explored a set of written texts contained in ‘I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century’, edited by Michel Foucault (1975). We describe the doll-making workshop, framing this description with a discussion of arts-based methodologies, through which we emphasise the potential of doll-making to enable different ways of knowing. We illustrate our account with examples of the dolls made and the writing produced in the workshop. We close with reflections on the workshop process and its wider application.