Description
This paper/presentation will share the process and outputs, as well as personal reflections, on my use of creative methodology (specifically collaging and fictional writing) to understand imaginaries of nuclear war. Creative research methods do not prioritise intellect and scholarship over imagination and creation but understands their combination - creative intelligence - as the key to an analytic project reaching new spaces.
(I) Collaging allows engagement with ‘scrappy research material’ where it is neither possible nor desirable to collect systematic data because that data shifts and moves. If nuclear imaginaries resemble a collage - with contradictions, overlaps, and shifting centres - then why not approach it through collaging?
(II) When imagining nuclear war, the narrative bounds are undefined, messy, permeable, and always intertextual. Writing as method points to the methodological importance of acknowledging the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.
