Bits and Pieces: Creative Collective Collaging Within and Beyond Academia
Jessie Jern, Elin Berg & Priscyll Anctil Avoine | 28 October 2026
Can the content in our recycling bins become vehicles that foster dialogue within and beyond academia? We think this is possible through creative collective collaging.
During the Global Societal Security Resilience Network (GSSRN) workshop, we engaged as facilitators and participants in a collaging session on designing strategies for feminist resilience. The workshop gathered 15 professionals in Stockholm (Sweden), ranging from academics, practitioners, emerging scholars, and activists, to discuss the backlash against the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda and ways to address the growing pressure it places on feminist, women, and LGBTQI+ collectives.
This shift in politics – towards increasing hostility against the WPS architecture – has led the GSSRN to build an archive of policy documents and activist works. In the collage session, participants explored the challenges and opportunities of the WPS Agenda in the defence sector, in the WPS communities of practice across regions, and in building resilient archives – central themes in our workshop panels.
During the workshop, we found collaging to be a helpful method to stimulate conversations on these topics, draft ideas, and break the ice between participants. It became a means to express frustration and hope about the backlash. Inspired by Saara Särmä’s work on the role of collaging in pushing the boundaries of how we research and study International Relations (IR), we suggest in this blog that collaging can act as a useful workshop activity to foster transdisciplinary feminist dialogue.
Working through collaging in workshop settings
Workshopping can be a powerful feminist tool for challenging dominant epistemologies. Equally, several feminist and queer scholars, such as Berg, Sliwinska and Vastapuu, have shown the power of visual in understanding world politics, wars and crises. Yet, as scholars, we rarely take the time to feel it ourselves in our methodological practices.
While collaging can be conducted individually, our process was collective: the resulting art pieces were created by many hands. Collective collaging can take many forms and be arranged around adjustable themes or goals. During our workshop, the facilitators prepared prompts for the panels that would occupy our time over the following days.
Participants were grouped and assigned to a workstation with a large sheet of paper, a printed prompt to work with (if they wanted to), and access to scissors, glue, magazines, paint, pens and stickers. Over the next two hours, the groups collaborated, assembling bits and pieces of paper into new configurations. The prompts were useful: they served as a guide to the conversation, but the groups could move beyond them while ripping, cutting, and glueing.
With music in the background and the body’s involvement in the making of theoretical reflection, the collage session was designed to engage participants in interactive work that explored the issues we then addressed during the rest of the workshop in Stockholm. Collaging fostered relationships among both new members and those who had previously met when the network was established last year in Brussels. As a workshop method, it also brought together people from different countries, sectors, and positions in conversation. We think that collaging through feminist workshopping has the potential to “subvert the hierarchy of expertise” and embrace exchanges within and beyond academia.
The compositions also became confined to the kinds of magazines selected beforehand – material that could be found at the defence university where the session took place. The selection of material helped set the boundaries for the collaging, but this format also provided space to explore varying interpretations – and remaking – of the materials provided and how they were used in the workshop.
Challenging linear modes of knowledge production
Collaging challenges linear modes of knowledge production and communication. It involves, as Kangas et al. suggest, “deconstructing and taking things apart but also fixing, mending and reconstructing them into a new composition.” For them, collaging allows recognising “the limits of language and becoming aware of the binaries that language reproduces” by “working with gaps, overlaps, holes, absences and silences – or lapses and excesses of meaning.”
This was also our experience: the collective collage exercise encouraged interpretations of various images, texts, and messages in ways that might have remained silenced in a traditional workshop format. It prompted different analytical lenses and innovative ideas for how we might use such materials to build our WPS feminist archive.
The images we chose to glue together in our collages, how they were cut out, where they were placed and next to what, their positions over or under, became recurrent discussions amongst the groups. Various meanings of these choices were expressed, and conversations could, for example, be about whether an image depicting the military was an expression of militarisation or not. This surfaced how we attach different – similar or overlapping – meanings to the same media and images, which generated tensions and discussions, while cultivating curiosity for diverse perspectives. It was a helpful tool for interpreting images, since much of how visuals are understood and studied in IR focuses on the message sent rather than on how it is received. Exploring various readings of images also yielded insights into the messages they conveyed.
Therefore, the materials themselves became sites of discussion about meaning-making and sense-making. The “layers upon layers” of interpretations that could be made, as well as how the fabrics of the material could be painted over, ripped, or disappear underneath. This hands-on activity was not simply about visuality but also evoked an “intersection of senses.”
This triggered conversations about the archive: who gets to visualise and how new data is generated through the collage. For two days, questions were raised about consent, ethical use, access and distribution of images. The politics of inclusion and exclusion of narratives, populations, and ideas also emerged during these talks. Similar debates can be found in the problematisation of the archive in academic research, bringing about ideas regarding “knowledge worth storing, keeping, interpreting and citing.”
A powerful pedagogical tool
As Särmä convincingly demonstrated, collaging can be a powerful intervention beyond workshop settings: we have explored integrated collaging in classrooms, collective settings, and during research projects. It is a potent activity to create ideas together, present research projects in new settings, and establish new working relationships.
For example, in the seminar My Thesis Project, at the Swedish Defence University, PhD students are invited to create a collage about their research projects as part of the programme’s introduction. Integrating this session at the beginning of networking has great value as an icebreaker. Collaging can also be an instrument for student course evaluation, as experienced in the course War’s Silent Legacy: Managing the Explosive Remnants of War at the same institution: it served as an collective and interactive tool to discuss what students have learned from the course’s concepts and theories.
Drawing upon popular trends in scrapbooking, and junk-journaling, collaging interventions are cheap to prepare, using recycled magazines, glue, glitter, paint, and scissors – items that are easily accessible in academic settings with limited resources. Our experiences showed that working with collective collaging engages individuals who normally enjoy creative methods and art, but also people who were sceptical about the idea of creative crafting in the professional setting. As a feminist method, collaging proved to be a collective and healing practice, especially in times where political spaces are shrinking for feminist and queer scholars.
Jessie Jern (she/her) is a doctoral student in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, where she researches military recruitment in esports and gaming landscapes.
Elin Berg (she/her) is a PhD candidate in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, where she is part of the Gender, Peace & Security research team. Currently, she is also one of the co-editors for the International Feminist Journal of Politics book review section.
Priscyll Anctil Avoine (she/her) is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an Assistant Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She is the director of Fundación Lüvo, a feminist antiracist collective.
