Grief Refracted: Digital Storytelling as Liberatory Praxis


Hannah Fowlie, University of Guelph

This presentation emerges from a research inquiry into the ways collaborative story-making about grief and loss illuminate possibilities for liberatory praxis. Rather than the traditional scholarly form of a book-length dissertation, this dissertation centres a feature-length film, weaving together the digital stories and interviews with poetic, visual, and sonic explorations of grief and loss. Part of the film’s title, “Grief Refracted,” was a gift from a storyteller, in conversation about the process. The storyteller spoke about digital storytelling as a prism for grief, a refraction that reveals a spectrum of colour. Grief is not a monolithic entity; it is highly nuanced and contextual. The myriad of emotional experiences that accompany grief, death, and dying are ineffable, and as our colonial, capitalistic society demands maximum productivity—and a quick return to work—grief is often obliviated, leaving us truly bereft. Although many of us may have our own traditions when it comes to grieving, we are living “within a broader culture whose mainstream norms impact their own subjectivity and understanding of the grieving process” (Granek, 2008, p. 3). We are further alienated from our expressions of grief by the psychological professions with their categorizing and pathologizing, such as the diagnosis of Complicated Grief and other Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) classifications, and social practices that hide grief away, and socialize us to express ourselves mainly in private or professional settings (Granek, 2008; Poole & Galvan, 2021; Willer et al., 2021). This presentation includes a clip from the film exploring grief and loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Collective storytelling strives to resist the neo-liberal denial of grief and loss and bear witness to experiences that are typically hidden away or ignored. This presentation  interrogates why some lives are grieved and others ignored, integrates mourning back into life to properly acknowledge grief and loss, and contributes to advancing knowledge and praxis in the emergent field of social practice and transformational change.

This paper will be presented at the following session: