Experimenting with twilight learnings and twilight writings for community engagement

This contribution explores community engagement through the collaborative practice ‘Twilight Learnings – Seasonal experiments in the Tiny House on Wheels (THoW)’. In this article, we show that a reflective community can start to emerge through sharing experiences and knowledges in a confined space that is simultaneously connected to society in a fractal scaling (O’Brien et al. 2023) way. Some of the participants grew so fond of reflecting together on hope, allies, uncertainties, pain and frustrations, that they continued to build the community by articulating themselves through follow-up interviews and through writing together in different ways. We document hidden and ‘marginal’ stages of a research process allowing longer timeframes so that practitioners and scholars can write together in a slow science (Stengers 2018) approach. This article mainly explores three aspects of community engagement: 1) reporting on community-based research and practice and reflective experiences in a workshop in the THoW; 2) reflecting on collective writing processes through performative writing 3) meta-reflecting on scaling and performativity. In other words, this article contributes to how knowledge production and world-making can go together through community engagement that extends into writing.