I am unable

<p dir="ltr">The first zine in this project was a series of hundred-word reflections (Lauren & Berlandt, 2019) [“<i>four hundreds for me</i>”] I wrote sitting under my desk at 7am in the middle of winter, underneath my a/r/tographic playmat. Somewhat compulsively, I wrote zine after zine as a sense-making exercise (Greene, 1987; Haynes, 2001), initially to examine my inability to participate in my own research. The turn occurs when I see these zines as a/r/tographic <i>openings</i> (Irwin, 2013) for and as research.</p><p dir="ltr">These zines unfolded to story reasons why I could not participate in my own research, including being tired [“<i>four hundreds for me”]</i>, being overwhelmed [“<i>how to do dishes”]</i>, discomfort around being a working mother [“<i>Re/searching, art/making, m/othering”]</i> and the feeling of drowning [“<i>What Are You Doing in Gloomy Hollow?”].</i><i> </i>I explored my inability to participate<i> </i>in a <i>living inquiry</i> that felt haunted by postpartum psychosis and the unravelling of significant childhood trauma [“<i>eeexxxccceessss”</i> and <i>“[sur]renderings: contiguity and living inquiry”]</i>. I folded a longtime friend into the process [“<i>how to make a zine when your life is falling apart”]</i> and started to see the boundaries between my personal zine-making and the zines made as da/r/ta by participants shift; they started to overlap. I started to see their grief for their schools mirrored in my own grief for my research [“<i>an ode to our goals for education (or something”]</i><i> </i>and my drowning in motherhood as contiguous with their drowning in schools [“<i>neither of these wolves can do it”</i>].</p><p dir="ltr">This collaged 8-page zine was made in response to the da[r]ta generated by/with participants in the research.</p>