Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Making Sense Of The Research
Making sense of what emerged without reducing complex experiences to simple categories.
What Does ‘Analysis’ Mean?
In research, analysis is the process of making sense of what has been generated through a study. In some forms of qualitative research, this might involve reading interview transcripts, identifying recurring ideas and organising them into themes.
Project Becomings required a somewhat different approach.
The research generated many different forms of material: conversations, creative works, photographs, digital reflections, researcher notes, embodied experiences and encounters with materials and spaces. These did not necessarily communicate knowledge in the same way, and not everything significant could be captured by turning it into words.
Analysis therefore involved continually returning to what was emerging across the research: noticing connections and differences, following ideas as they appeared in different places, attending to moments that seemed significant and considering what happened when different experiences, materials and theoretical ideas were brought into relation.
Rather than looking for a set of fixed categories that could explain everyone's experience of recovery, the analysis remained interested in relations, movement, difference and complexity.
This meant asking not only: “What does this mean?” but also: “What is happening here?”, “What is connecting?”
“What is changing?” or “What might this encounter be making possible?”.
Analysis Throughout The Research
Analysis in Project Becomings did not begin only after all of the research activities had finished. Making sense of what was happening took place throughout the project.
Conversations, creative practices and digital reflections could raise questions or make particular ideas noticeable. These could then be returned to through later activities, considered alongside other contributions or encountered differently as the research developed.
This meant that generating research material and interpreting it were not completely separate activities. A conversation might influence what was explored through a later creative practice. Something produced through making might change how an earlier discussion was understood. Researcher reflections could draw attention to an encounter that warranted further exploration.
Analysis therefore involved moving backwards, forwards and across the research material, continually considering what was emerging and how different encounters related to one another.
Importantly, this did not mean that every recurring idea became a fixed theme. Attention was also given to differences, tensions, contradictions, affective intensities and moments that disrupted emerging understandings. These could be as important as similarities in thinking about the complexity of recovery.
Over time, patterns of relational, material, affective and experiential significance became increasingly apparent across the research. These were interpreted through the project's theoretical foundations and contributed to the developing conceptualisation of recovery.
Analysis was therefore not a single stage of the research journey. It was an ongoing process of noticing, returning, questioning and thinking differently.
Following Relations, Not Just Themes
Across Project Becomings, recurring patterns and points of significance did become visible. But the purpose of analysis was not simply to separate these into a set of themes that could describe what recovery was.
Instead, attention turned towards relationships between things. An experience of recovery might involve a person, but also a relationship, a particular space, an object, a memory, a bodily sensation, a moment in time or something that happened through a creative practice.
Looking at any one of these elements in isolation risked losing something important about how recovery was actually being experienced and produced.
Analysis therefore involved following connections across the research: noticing how bodies interacted with environments, how materials participated in creative encounters, how relationships changed what became possible, how past and present could become entangled, and how knowledge could shift through experience.
Contradictions were important too. Two co-researchers could encounter something very differently, or the same person might experience something differently at another moment. Rather than treating these differences as problems to resolve, they could reveal something about the situated and changing nature of recovery.
This relational way of analysing was informed by the project's feminist new materialist and affective foundations. It encouraged attention to patterns of relational, material, affective and experiential significance, rather than treating them as fixed categories detached from the encounters through which they emerged.
Gradually, these relations began to contribute to a different way of conceptualising recovery — one that could hold multiple interacting dimensions without reducing recovery to a single pathway or explanation.
From Analysis To The Visual Assemblage
As analysis continued, it became increasingly difficult to understand recovery through a series of separate themes or as movement through a predetermined process.
Instead, recurring relational, material, affective and experiential patterns appeared across workshops, creative works, digital reflections, embodied encounters and researcher reflexivity.
What became particularly significant was not simply the presence of these different aspects of recovery, but how they interacted. Relationships could alter how spaces were experienced. Materials could enable different forms of expression or knowing. Past experiences could become present within particular encounters. What somebody knew cognitively could sit in tension with what their body appeared able to feel or do.
Trying to separate these experiences into discrete categories risked losing the very relations that appeared to matter.
The Visual Assemblage of Trauma Recovery developed in response to this problem. Rather than representing recovery as a sequence of stages, it offered a way of holding multiple dimensions of recovery together while recognising that their relationships could continually change.
The model therefore did not appear suddenly at the end of analysis as a final answer. It developed through the ongoing movement between empirical material, creative and embodied encounters, researcher reflexivity and the theoretical ideas informing the study.
The resulting assemblage offered a way to ask a different question about recovery: not simply “Where is someone in their recovery?”, but “What is coming together here, and what is this particular configuration making possible?”
