Abstract

HOMING is an act of documentary co-creation, of creating new connections, re-imagining the land and the people who inhabit it. It’s an act of re-making home and rewriting the future. This research-creation project explores the processes of documentary co-creation as a tool for valuing the plurality of knowledges of women from various backgrounds living in rural areas. Working with the concept of home, HOMING is inspired by a range of methods of inquiry and concepts, such as “digital storybridging” inspired from “video bridging” (Frise and Cizek 2009), “conversation” (Kovach 2009), “small places” (Zimmermann and De Michiel 2018) and “poetic inquiry” (Galvin and Prendergast 2016). These acts of co-creation, which are open, flexible, mobile and multiscalar (Zimmermann and De Michiel 2018; Auguiste et al. 2020) are grounded in an approach of “sensitive engagement” (Nash 2009). Emerging from these co-creative processes is a plurality of microhistories of women and ruralities. Together we cultivate and co-create “spaces of home” in a time when we are witnessing waves of individualism, nationalism and othering wash across the world. HOMING goes beyond the act of storytelling (Juhasz and Lebow 2018), inasmuch as it uses documentary co-creation to generate new social configurations on a rural territory.