Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Knowing Beyond Words
Exploring what bodies, materials, images and creative encounters can make knowable beyond what can easily be said.
Not Everything Can Be Put Into Words
Much research relies on people being able to explain their experiences through language. Yet experiences of trauma and recovery are not always easily available through words.
Someone may understand something intellectually while experiencing it very differently within their body. A sensation may be felt before it can be explained. An image, object or material may evoke something without having a straightforward verbal description. At other times, a person may simply not yet know what something means.
Project Becomings therefore did not assume that spoken or written accounts provided the only — or necessarily the most complete — way of knowing recovery.
Creative practices created opportunities to encounter experiences differently. Through body mapping, photography, clay, threadwork and other forms of making, co-researchers could work with colour, texture, shape, space, movement, images and materials, rather than having to translate everything immediately into language.
Importantly, creative works were not treated simply as illustrations of something that could ultimately be explained better through words. Making could itself become a way of knowing. What happened through an encounter with a material, what emerged unexpectedly, or what was experienced bodily could create possibilities for understanding that had not existed beforehand.
This expanded what could be attended to within the research. Knowing could be spoken, visual, material, embodied, affective or experiential — and sometimes remain partly unresolved.
The Body as a Site of Knowing
Project Becomings drew attention to the body as more than something that carries trauma or responds to recovery. The body could also participate in knowing.
Co-researchers could intellectually understand something about themselves or recovery while finding that this knowledge was not necessarily reflected in what they felt or were able to do. Equally, bodily responses could communicate something before it could be consciously understood or articulated.
Creative practices made some of these tensions more perceptible. Working with the outline of a body, touching and manipulating materials, moving through spaces or responding physically to an image could draw attention to sensations, reactions and embodied experiences that conversation alone might not have surfaced.
Rather than treating these responses as secondary to verbal accounts, the research remained attentive to what bodies appeared to know, feel and do within particular encounters.
This also complicated any simple distinction between mind and body. Knowing was not understood as something that happened only through conscious thought and was then acted upon by the body. Bodies, environments, memories, emotions, relationships and materials could become entangled in how something was experienced and understood.
This was particularly significant for thinking about recovery. Knowing what might support recovery was not necessarily the same as being able to feel, embody or enact that knowledge. The space between knowing and doing therefore became important in understanding how recovery could unfold.
Materials Can Participate Too
Project Becomings drew attention to the body as more than something that carries trauma or responds to recovery. The body could also participate in knowing.
Co-researchers could intellectually understand something about themselves or recovery while finding that this knowledge was not necessarily reflected in what they felt or were able to do. Equally, bodily responses could communicate something before it could be consciously understood or articulated.
Creative practices made some of these tensions more perceptible. Working with the outline of a body, touching and manipulating materials, moving through spaces or responding physically to an image could draw attention to sensations, reactions and embodied experiences that conversation alone might not have surfaced.
Rather than treating these responses as secondary to verbal accounts, the research remained attentive to what bodies appeared to know, feel and do within particular encounters.
This also complicated any simple distinction between mind and body. Knowing was not understood as something that happened only through conscious thought and was then acted upon by the body. Bodies, environments, memories, emotions, relationships and materials could become entangled in how something was experienced and understood.
This was particularly significant for thinking about recovery. Knowing what might support recovery was not necessarily the same as being able to feel, embody or enact that knowledge. The space between knowing and doing therefore became important in understanding how recovery could unfold.
When Meaning Remains Uncertain
Not everything that emerged through Project Becomings could — or needed to — be given an immediate explanation.
A creative work might feel significant without its maker being able to say precisely why. A bodily response could be noticed without being fully understood. An encounter with a material might produce something unexpected, while an image could continue to evoke different responses at different moments.
Within more conventional approaches to analysis, there can be pressure to resolve uncertainty: to name an experience, interpret an object or determine what something means. Project Becomings created greater space for some things to remain unresolved.
This did not mean that uncertainty was treated as an absence of knowledge or a failure of the research. Not knowing could itself do something. It could interrupt familiar explanations, expose the limits of existing understandings and create space for different questions to emerge.
This became particularly important when thinking about recovery. Established ideas about what recovery should be could sometimes make other possibilities difficult to imagine. Encountering uncertainty could loosen those assumptions, allowing co-researchers to question what they thought they knew and experiment with different ways of understanding their experiences.
The researcher also had to resist the temptation to fill these spaces. An ambiguous artwork, silence or embodied response did not automatically become something for the researcher to interpret on somebody else's behalf.
Sometimes remaining with uncertainty was more ethically and analytically valuable than forcing an experience into an explanation.
Expanding What Counts As Knowledge
Project Becomings ultimately raised a broader question about what research allows to count as knowledge.
Spoken and written accounts remained important, but they were not the only places in which knowledge could emerge. Bodies could respond before experiences could be articulated. Materials could alter what became possible through making. Images could communicate without providing a single explanation. Affect could be felt between people, objects and spaces, while uncertainty could interrupt established ways of understanding recovery.
Attending to these different forms of knowing did not mean that everything encountered within the research automatically became evidence, or that every bodily or material response could be confidently interpreted.
Instead, it required a different kind of analytical attention: one that remained open to what words could tell us, what other encounters might make perceptible, and where the limits of interpretation needed to be respected.
This expanded understanding of knowledge became important to how recovery itself was conceptualised.
Recovery could not be understood only through what someone knew about it. It was also entangled with what could be felt, experienced, embodied, practised and made possible through particular relationships and environments.
Knowing, then, was not simply something contained within an individual mind. It could emerge through the relations between people, bodies, materials, spaces, experiences and ideas.