2020/04/06 by Astrid Ensslin, C. B. F. Rice, Sarah Riley +5 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship
paper · pdf · doi:10.7273/c26p-0t17
openalex publication_date 2020/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Against the backdrop of écriture feminine and e-lit texts, Ensslin et. al advance methods and findings of the "Writing New Bodies" project (“WNB”; SSHRC IG 435-2018-1036; Ensslin, Rice, Riley, Bailey, Fowlie, Munro, Perram, and Wilks) to lay the foundations of Applied E-literature Research. Their aim is to develop a digital fiction for a new form of contemporary, digital-born bibliotherapy. In following the principles of critical community co-design and feminist participatory action research, WNB engages young woman-identified and gender nonconforming individuals ages eighteen to twenty-five in envisioning worlds where they feel at home in their bodies. The workshops encourage them to engage, conversationally and through reading, co-designing and writing digital fiction, with key challenges facing young women today, including cis- and heteronormative gender relations, racism, anti-fat attitudes, ableism, and familial influences on the ways young women “ought to look” (Rice). This essay originally appeared as a keynote at the 2019 ELO conference in Cork, delivered by Ensslin.