Finding friends as an adult is really difficult. As a child it’s easy to approach someone, state your name, and ask if they want to play: sorted. As an adult such an approach might be frowned upon or at least raise a quizzical eyebrow. Although tricky, friendship – or to use Haraway’s (2016) word, ‘kinship’ – is important for support within academia. Devenish et al. (2009) suggests peer support and collaborative working patterns are important to progress in HE due to the competitive and often marketised systems. The advice is pointedly at finding your fellows – but this brings us back to that first statement: finding friends, allies, kin, can be a real challenge.
The #baglady methodology responds to that statement by explaining how four early career researchers (ECRs) found each other through storying with objects. To find out more about their becoming-collective you can read the Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry article or listen to their recent BERA podcast.
Their initial kinship expanded into several academic spaces including a Friday night book club where others joined in to work through some heavier posthuman philosophies. More kinship grew, not just out of trying to understand the difference between an assemblage and a rhizome, rather through the affirmative relationships they nurtured. Drawn together by what Bennett (2010) would call ‘thingly-scent’, as time has gone by they have put their kinship to work to model how the #baglady methodology can ripple through established systems drawing in others to affirmative and supportive ways.
