Cirrus@Austlit

'Can storytelling be(come) post-human? If so, how? This article shares creative insights from a collaborative inquiry at the intersection of queer, neurodivergent, and ecological writing. Writing from the fringes of our various disciplines and levels of precarity within the academy, we came together as a collective of researchers who share an interest in creative methods and an orientation towards storytelling as “a political and heuristic tool” involving “human and nonhuman” processes (Wiame, 2018). We made use of new materialist and posthuman perspectives as we grappled with an empathy that neither anthropomorphises nor objectifies the nonhuman Other, and seeks to portray the agency of a world that does not centre on the human, or not only the human. We sought to rewrite the human as marginal. This work, informed by theories of writing and artmaking as ways of knowing, engaged in poetic inquiry and co/autoethnography. Responding individually to shared creative prompts, we explored possibilities of writing as nonhuman entities. We then compared our writings, observing rhizomatic connections and branchings-out to explore the challenges and possibilities of post- human storytelling. Our article describes these insights and signals unfolding directions for ongoing inquiry and the challenges of storying from the margins of the human.' (Publication abstract)