Using Fragments to Uncover Connections Through Call and Response, Resonance, and Dissonance

Abstract

CANI-net (Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network) has evolved over the last thirty years from being a research center and network at the University of Bristol to holding online monthly “open inquiry space” sessions attended by scholars, educators, and artists around the world. The sessions are flexible, encouraging the presentation of work in progress, ideas just emerging, middling, in a warm, friendly, supportive atmosphere with students and academics and others engaging, collaborating, and offering feedback to one another. Each session usually offers the opportunity for those present to write into the shared space, and to then share that writing. In the sharing, other spaces are opened up; the emergent writing is sometimes crafted into a journal paper. This article is an exemplar of CANI-net’s increasing publications. The writing in this paper is inspired by a session facilitated by Laurinda Brown. With three “calls and responses,” not all participants could share their writing for each call in the session. With no obligation to share, some responses remain absent. The responses in this paper appear together for the first time, thus exemplifying how participants riff off the work of others in these CANI-net sessions.