Re-writing back to bigotry: practice-led dialogues using revisionist adaptation as critique

This article describes a critically-creative research collaboration wherein co-researchers use creative re-writing strategies to critique normative assumptions and interrogate bigotry. Our group is a university-based collective with a shared interest in creative methodological approaches to investigating sociocultural issues. Combining creative practice and social justice values within an academic setting, this article shares excerpts of poetry and flash fiction produced through creative re-writings. Using workshop-based methods of revisionist adaptation, we each produced creative responses to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which the changes made to the base text offer critiques through the (re)incorporation of subaltern perspectives and ideologies. We then shared our responses, recognizing points of similarity, difference, and connection prompted by the breadth of possibilities the single narrative provided. Through these comparative and reflexive discussions, we came to deeper understandings of our own intersecting but distinct relationships to multiple axes of social privilege and marginalization. We provide a model for writers, artists, and researchers looking to challenge bigotry and related forms of injustice in and beyond academic settings through similar workshops that utilize the potential of creative practice-led dialogues and exchanging ideas in pursuit of social progress.