Collaging and folding research stories
#100dayproject2026, days 1-7
How can we visually represent a research question? How can a research journey be told by cutting and combining papers, instead of workds? How can a complex idea - a concept, an argument, a framework - materialise through paper?
The first week of #100dayproject2026 kicked off just a few days before I attended the “Workshops on Workshopping” in Utrecht - an event, organised by the Skagen Institute on Transgressive Methods and the Futures+Literacies+Methods Lab. I was invited to deliver oneof the “pressure cooker” demos, a snippet preview of creative participatory methods, used in social sciences and humanities. I called my demo “Visualising theory with paper and scissors: arts and crafts as critical making”, and dedicated the first week of the 100dayproject to preparing some examples. Collage, folder paper, scissors, limited materials and colours - my usual :). One day, one card, one question or topic.
The topics and themes emerged as I worked.
1.How can we see the environmental impact of smart cities, when their data materialities, connectivity infrastructures, and planetary harms are often out of sight, out of mind (as Liu Xin and I have argued in our recent book)?
2.Misinformation, AI literacies, and digital futures. How can we wade through AI slop and information overload, and develop multiple literacies - visual, cognitive, social, environmental, and more? What digital futures do we imagine, beyond labour theft, resource extraction, and misinformation? Or perhaps, these are integral to how we should be thinking about digital futures -futures for whom? I am currently researching some of these, together with my colleagues at Digital Society Research Group.
3.Complex problems, multiple methods, transgressive explorations. The question of how/ whare/ and what are our methods is ongoing. In the field, increasingly dominated by positivist, large-scale, quantitative and tech-enabled methodologies, asking what is data and where do our methods live (in our bodies? minds? hearts? in infrastructurs around us? in land, water and trees?) is crucial.
Every single piece created this week is informed by my work as a researcher. But these research stories can only be told this way through art, through tactile processes, by cutting, collaging, glueing and folding.
I packed my bag full of accordion books, collaged cards, and art supplies, and head to see like-minded creative researchers.
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