Stretching Our Stories (SOS): Digital Worldmaking in Troubled Times

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on the pivot to online research creation in COVID’s wake, and offer a gallery of ten films that emerged through on-line multimedia story-making under lockdown conditions. We describe what new, online research creation has meant for us as critical disability and intersectionality scholars who work with creative visual methods—both with and in justice-seeking communities. We introduce COVID-era adaptions to the research creation practices we co-developed that helped to sustain racialized/allied, disability, fat, neurodivergent, mad, aging cultures and communities during the pandemic. We focus on the bifurcated affective economies that circulated around COVID, and how these affects surface in the stories of makers who participated in on-line multimedia workshops that we have run since March 2020. While the pandemic has deepened inequalities and disrupted research and arts activism, we argue that it provided opportunity to expand possibilities for disability and non-normative cultural production and to imagine and fight for a radically different world.