Collaging on Emotions at University

Collage making has been appropriated by qualitative social researchers as congruent with perspectives that emphasise reality as partial, subjective and socially constructed, and that embrace accessible, embodied and ambiguous forms of representation, exploring ideas metaphorically to provide new and nuanced perspectives on experiences and phenomena (Mannay, 2015). In the research process, by bringing together disparate elements and accommodating multiple texts and visuals in a single work, collage making is a powerful way to provoke participants to think and see differently through connections, associations and meanings that would otherwise remain out of reach (Leavy, 2020). Collage is primarily used as a process to elicit participants' thoughts and experiences through the practice of collecting fragments of pre-existing images, found objects and fabrics, or a mixture of these, and cutting, tearing, folding or crumpling these remnants and attaching them to a flat surface to convey a visual message (Butler-Kisber, 2019).
In addition to being created during (Culshaw, 2019) or before (Mannay, 2010) an interview session with the researcher, participants' collages can also be created in a shared workshop space. I contribute to the Roundtable by sharing and discussing insights from a research workshop I designed and facilitated on 'Me at the University', in which participants created collages to represent their emotional experience of being immersed in the university environment, and collectively discussed how the images used take on different meanings from their original context. I highlight how this process allows participants to simultaneously reflect on unexpected meanings and share their experiences.