Slow Story-Making in Urgent Times

Abstract

In the context of an alarmingly sped up “slow death” for disabled people living under emergency COVID-19 medical triage protocols in Ontario, Canada, that produce, naturalize, and weaponize our vulnerability, we assert that slow digital story-making opens a threshold space filled with complex, relational, lively collaborative worldmaking. Here, we analyze videos made by three digital/multimedia story-makers, known as experimenters, who express the turbulence they lived through via storywork that described their unique yet entwined vantage points. Following Rosi Braidotti’s caution against capitalizing on tragedy, we offer Donna Haraway’s “compost writing” as an alternative to building theory. By compos(t)ing online multimedia stories that straddle digital/human/more-than-human realms, we take up “digital composting” as an unfinished methodology wherein we move collectively, even from the isolation of our own homes. We posit slow digital story-making as a way of “staying with the trouble” as we find ourselves worldmaking at the complex threshold between life/death, vulnerability/resistance, individual/relational, human/nonhuman. To compost digital multimedia stories is to leave them to ruminate in the complex entanglements of posthuman existences in urgent times.