The Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ) is pleased to invite you to join us on June 5, 2026 for a CQ Public Seminar titled ‘Method as Encounter: The Affects and Impacts of Digital/Multimedia Storytelling’ presented by Drs. Jennifer Poole, Hannah Fowlie, May Friedman, Carla Rice, and Ingrid Mündel.
This is a virtual event.
Event Details
Panelists: Dr. Hannah Fowlie, Dr. May Friedman, Dr. Carla Rice, and Dr. Ingrid Mündel
Title: Method as Encounter: The Affects and Impacts of Digital/Multimedia Storytelling
Date and Time: June 5, 2026 | 12PM to 1.30PM EST
Venue: Online (Zoom)
Register here.
Seminar Description
In this panel presentation, we draw on The Work of Stories in the World, a SSHRC funded research project that conceptualizes method as encounter—an affective, ethical, and relational praxis—nested within digital and multimedia storytelling with justice-denied and justice-desiring communities. Drawing from feminist, decolonial, and Black liberatory traditions, our method foregrounds storytelling as a site of co-creation, where knowledge is not extracted but horizontally and collaboratively shaped through emotional, political, and embodied engagements and encounters. Story-work here is treated as a transversal methodology, a site of encounter that unsettles traditional research hierarchies and invites new forms of expertise rooted in lived and living experience, difference-attuned witnessing, and affective and intellectual resonance. In each story-workshop, we adapt story-based methods to explore how stories move, unsettle, and remake both researchers and participants, upending any clear distinction between the two. Our project gestures toward posthumanist and neomaterialist theories to consider, in Barad’s terms, how bodies, technologies, and narratives “intra-act”—how we are made, unmade, and remade through the stories we tell and receive.
About the Speakers
Dr. Hannah Fowlie is the Manager for Storytelling and Social Equity at Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. Dr. Fowlie has worked extensively with Re•Vision, collaborating with participants on wide ranging topics including disability justice, decolonial education, and feminist praxis to make short films about their experiences. Dr. Fowlie has a life-long love and involvement the arts as an actor, director, and filmmaker, and firmly believes that art has the power to make societal change.
Dr. May Friedman is a faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University. Much of May’s work explores issues of fat activism and weight stigma in many different settings. Drawing from her own experiences as a fat racialized mother, May looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines. Using a range of arts-based methods including digital storytelling as well as analyses of treasured garments, May has explored meaning making and representation in relation to embodiment and experience.
Dr. Carla Rice is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Feminist Studies and Social Practice and Founding and Academic Director of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. She specializes in feminist, difference, and disability theory and in research creation methodologies with a focus on changing systems and fostering social well-being and justice.
Dr. Ingrid Mündel is the Managing Director of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice. Ingrid holds a PhD in Literature and Performance Studies from the University of Guelph and is an experienced community-based researcher, facilitator, and educator with a particular interest in art-based approaches to community dialogue and social change.
