Feather Flowers, ‘Home’ and a Global Pandemic: Collaborative Storytelling and the Relationality of Things

Please read on for an outline of a recently published article by Fran Edmonds, Maree Clarke, Kate Senior and Daphne Daniels, called ‘Feather Flowers, ‘Home’ and a Global Pandemic: Collaborative Storytelling and the Relationality of Things’

ABSTRACT: This chapter is a response to an experiment held during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, called Massive/Micro Autoethnography. The experiment asked researchers from around the world to write a daily response to a series of prompts that revealed how they navigated new pathways in their research during lockdowns.

In this chapter Fran, Maree, Kate and Daphne collaborate to explore the interconnections between the materiality of ‘things’ in a global pandemic. Their story focuses on ‘feather flowers’ from the Aboriginal community of Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land now located in Melbourne Museum, the authors’ experiences of lockdown, and how the story of the feather flowers intersect with the idea of ‘home’ as a ‘living archive’. Coalescing global crises at the time of the pandemic, such as climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement, are discussed as they impact the authors’ lives. The story is a collaborative/intercultural autoethnography written between four women—two Indigenous and two non-Indigenous—with the aim of progressing research which supports Indigenous knowledge systems to comprehend the relationality of everything. How the authors resolve to tell their story as an autoethnography reveals the continuing intersections of their lives across multiple contexts.

Unfortunately, this article is not open access.

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Edmonds, F., Clarke, M., Senior, K., Daniels, D. (2022). Feather Flowers, ‘Home’ and a Global Pandemic: Collaborative Storytelling and the Relationality of Things. In: Harris, D.X., Luka, M.E., Markham, A.N. (eds) Massive/Micro Autoethnography. Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research, vol 4. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8305-3_5

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