The breath that holds us: tending methodologies of listening, care, and attention in collaborative, arts-based enquiry

Abstract

This article draws on disability justice ethics and an intersectional feminist politics of listening to critically reflect on the use of creative methods in collaborative enquiry and community-engaged research. It examines the methodological possibilities of voice-notes – short, recorded audio memos – as a creative, relational method of engagement and research-creation. Reflecting on experiences from a collaborative, arts-based research project with women and non-binary people living with breathlessness and Long Covid and a subsequent community radio collaboration, I reflect on the processes of making, sharing, listening to, and responding to voice-notes. By foregrounding the unevenly distributed conditions of debility, labour, and capacity that shape participatory research, the article highlights the importance of cultivating ethical approaches to creative engagement that account for privilege and dynamics of power. Attending to the form, pace, and temporal rhythms of the project, it argues that voice-notes create a flexible and intimate container for holding discomfort, vulnerability, and embodied knowledge in ways that privilege quiet engagements, crip and slow temporalities, and small-scale relationality. I suggest creative modes of collaborative enquiry grounded in collective care, reciprocity, slowness, and attention offer vital insights for research and practice in (post-)pandemic times – inviting inclusive, tender, and reparative practices of mediated listening and collaborative knowledge co-creation. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of cultivating ethical approaches to research and practice across diverse and unevenly shared experiences, contributing to emerging conversations on reparative and care-centred research praxis.