School of Social & Political Sciences

This post is a reflection on Stories from the Firepit: Exploring Restorative Intercultural Practices — a book about restorative narrative research and intercultural practice, forthcoming from Multilingual Matters.

We ache for liberating, emancipatory practices. If you are coming from sociology, or adjacent fields, this will feel familiar. It is an old desire: that our ‘socially engaged’ and ‘politically driven’ work might not only interpret the world as we see it but intervene in it.

Today, this desire is finding renewed expression across the social sciences. We see it in the turn to arts-based methods, in transdisciplinary collaborations, in attempts to stretch not only what research can be, but what academia itself might become.

It is a double bind: the more precarious academia gets (less funding, fewer PhD scholarships, an ever-increasing number of postdoctoral applications, censorship, you name it), the more we turn to arts-based methods, participatory approaches, and narrativised forms of research. There is another pressure here, too: as the arts themselves are marked by precarity, underfunding, and deep fault lines of class and access, it is worth asking whether this turn to storytelling and arts-based work in academia is also, in part, a search for an elsewhere - an outlet that the arts, as an industry, also fail to sustain.

Asking these approaches, perhaps, to carry more than they can, we begin to place higher hopes in them: that they might liberate academia from itself, by demanding it become something else. Now, of course, no research method guarantees (or is a failsafe for) emancipatory experiences. Scholars, artists, and researchers who have navigated autocratic regimes, violent border policies, or academic spaces fraught with the criminalisation of freedom of thought have long insisted on resisting an automated appropriation of “emancipatory” practices. What they call for instead is a remade sense of risk-taking.

Part of that risk-taking, for us, and where the story of this work actually begins, emerged in the context of a community (playfully called the firepitters), meeting online in the early days of the pandemic, convened by Alison Phipps.

‘Us’ here is a loose gathering of early career researchers and doctoral students, past and present: dispersed, grieving, and hoping for different things. Many of us, in our own ways, had come to believe that we had learned resilience outwith institutions as displaced scholars, storytellers, poets, artists – most of us, though not all, and not in the same ways.

When you are locked down, mostly by yourself (conferences cancelled, seminars suspended, funding decreased) and unable to leave contexts that are, at times, too painful to remain in, the usual self-narrative is chipped away. I, for one, wasn’t sure who I was. “You are not your research” goes the academic wellbeing cliché. Are we not? Really? Then why did that temporary loss of institutional recognition (those credits, conferences, affiliations) feel so consequential? Why did it feel so difficult to introduce ourselves to a group of friends, colleagues, allies? It should be a simple task. It wasn’t. “I am Erdem, and I have just been accepted to a conference - which is not going ahead anymore”, “I am such and such, and the EU funding has just been deferred - I might have to stay where I am. I might have to go to military service.” Some of us have to be our research.

The challenge of these gatherings was permitting ambivalence about who we were institutionally. A kind of zero utilitarianism.

Enter friend and colleague Piki. And that is where the tale actually starts: in one of our early firepit gatherings, she introduces us to the practice of pepeha from Aotearoa New Zealand. We must have looked a bit confused, because she said: “essentially, it is a way of introducing yourself to others. But it is actually a way of speaking to and of your ancestors, the river that you were born next to, the mountain you rested in the shadow of, the tree that you can name… We could think about how to do this in a culturally safe way.” Against a double bind that feels crushing and monolithic, what we talked about (and how we talked) felt, in that sense, useless. None of the usual lifelines were there: no research funding chat, no “I am supervised by…”, none of that. This book wasn’t on the cards. Nor was calling my dad to ask what impressionistic, magical river I was born next to, only for him to say: “well… now that you mention it, there was a sewage next to that flat.” (Only apt for an exiled queer.)

Stories from the Firepit is a collection that gathers narratives that are full of ghosts, ancestors, fragments, sewage babies, grandmothers, and weird families. One of my own contributions reflects on how my research was made possible through a series of encounters with a person at the till in a local supermarket in the West End of Glasgow – a ‘bad betty’ as she would then call herself. Not an ancestor in any biological sense – but an ancestor of a tale nonetheless. 

The book, at least in the way I see it, is not offering a new method, or a better framework. But a meaningful reminder that we are not convinced that academia, as it stands, should be the thing that gives us who we are. There is, indeed, something restorative, and reparative, in that. Something that allows us and what we do to be useless for metrics, for the performance of academic grandiosity and elitism.

It is also a very good way of stopping asking academia for recognition and identity markers - simply because academia, and the knowledges it claims, have always been entangled with us, with our relations, our histories, our present, and our obligations after all. And nothing else.

 

 

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Exploring Restorative Intercultural Practices: Fire Stories edited by Piki Diamond, Tawona Sitholé, and Alison Phipps is out May 2026 from Multilingual Matters.

First published: 20 April 2026