Slow Story-Making in Urgent Times

In the context of an alarmingly sped up “slow death” for disabled people living under emergency COVID-19 medical triage protocols in Ontario, Canada, that produce, naturalize, and weaponize our vulnerability, we assert slow digital story-making opens a threshold space filled with complex, relational, lively collaborative worldmaking. Here, analyze videos made by three digital/multimedia story-makers, known as experimenters, who express turbulence they lived through via storywork described their unique yet entwined vantage points. Following Rosi Braidotti’s caution against capitalizing on tragedy, offer Donna Haraway’s “compost writing” alternative to building theory. By compos(t)ing online multimedia stories straddle digital/human/more-than-human realms, take “digital composting” unfinished methodology wherein move collectively, even from isolation own homes. We posit way “staying trouble” find ourselves worldmaking at complex between life/death, vulnerability/resistance, individual/relational, human/nonhuman. To compost is leave them ruminate entanglements posthuman existences urgent times.