Grief Refracted: Digital Storytelling as Liberatory Praxis
Abstract
This project explores experiences of disenfranchised grief (Doka,1989) with eight storytellers exploring grief and loss that is further disenfranchised by discrimination, marginalization, and oppression. The central question framing this project is: In what ways does collaborative story-making about grief and loss illuminate possibilities for liberatory praxis? A related question is: How do we resist dominant pressures to suppress our grief, hide it away and instead come together to grieve out loud and collectively? Rather than the traditionalscholarly form of a book-length dissertation, this dissertation centres a feature-length film, weaving together the digital stories and interviews with poetic, visual, and sonic explorations of grief and loss.
Dissertation
Rather than the traditional scholarly form of a book-length dissertation, this research culminates in a feature-length film, in which the participants’ and researcher's digital stories are woven together thematically and aesthetically in ways that present an alternative politics and poetics of grief. This dissertation form allows for an interconnected layering of first- person experiences with critical theory and pays close attention to the aesthetics of the work to surface how uneven power saturates experiences of grief and loss, rendering certain lives, experiences, memories, events more or less grievable than others, as well as shaping, though not determining, the conditions of grief and resistance.
Written Reflection
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my mother, Inge Fowlie, who generously agreed to be interviewed for this project, the storytellers who dove right in and co-created their profound stories. My Advisor, Dr. Carla Rice, for her brilliant insights and sustenance, and my Advisory Committee members, Dr. Rebecca Caines, and Dr. Elizabeth Jackson who supported this process with wisdom and compassion, Dr. Ingrid Mündel who kindly buoyed me up throughout, and Philip Lortie, my creative partner, who is always there to challenge and cheer me on and take me for walks.