Counter-Archives of the Doctoral Journey: Junk Journaling as Archive-Building in Motion

• In Event: Archival Pedagogy: Moving Images as Research, Resistance, and Relational Learning

Abstract

This paper examines the critical-creative practice of junk journaling—collage-making with found and scrap materials—as an emergent mode of arts-based inquiry that attends to often overlooked, affective, and textured dimensions of doctoral life. Positioned as a form of embodied scholarship, junk journaling becomes a way of thinking with movement, material, place, and memory to disrupt conventional academic approaches to knowledge production. During the presenter’s first year as a first-generation graduate student, a series of junk journals were created while in motion: each journal was assembled during travel to academic conferences, positioning movement as a generative condition of inquiry. These journals operated as sites of noticing, documenting, interrogating, and archiving interior and exterior experiences—mapping the layered terrain of what it means to become a scholar. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s (2003) theorization of the archive and the repertoire, and Tina Campt’s (2017) notion of listening to images, this paper investigates how knowledge is generated through embodied motion, aesthetic and relational encounter, more-than-human and land-based entanglements. The paper argues for the legitimacy of ephemeral, felt, and gestured forms of inquiry as counter-archives—ones that resist dominant logics grounded in permanence, hierarchy, and textuality. Methodologically, the study employed four self-confrontation interviews (Núñez Moscoso et al., 2023) to analyze each journaling process across temporal phases—before, during, and after creation. These interviews facilitated a reflexive engagement with each junk journal as a textured literacy artifact, enabling the presenter to track how meaning and insight unfolded through time. Findings illuminate junk journaling as a space of identity negotiation, researcher reflexivity, and academic community building, where the boundary between academic and artistic self becomes porous and generative. The journals reveal how knowledge is constructed through layered engagements with time, materiality, community, and affect—foregrounding relational and land-based textures of doctoral life that often remain obscured within scholarly discourse. By centering motion, scraps, torn edges, and the in-between, this paper proposes a framework for arts-based educational researchers, critical literacy scholars, doctoral students and educators to engage with junk journaling as a method of inquiry. It advocates for a reorientation toward the repertoire—toward practices that are felt, gestured, and lived—as legitimate and vital forms of scholarly knowledge. In doing so, the paper surfaces tensions between historically legitimized archival practices and minoritized literacy practices, disrupting binaries between the material and the embodied, the written and the spoken, the linguistic and the semiotic, the creative and the rational.

Author

• Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University