Playing Speculative Cat's Cradle

Reckoning with the Feminist Potentialities of Twine

Authors

Keywords:

Twine, speculative fabulation, feminism, collaboration, creative practice, nonlinear storytelling

Abstract

Inspired by the feminist possibilities within digital technologies and acknowledging their limitations, the authors examine the collaborative process of creating Twine workshops for three conferences, the International Communications Association, the Canadian Communications Association, and the Open Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association. The workshops engaged with Twine as an interactive tool for reckoning with narratives of Empire through feminist, nonlinear, non-normative, creative expression and explored how embracing the ethos of Twine might enable collaborative analog ideation. In Twine, we see ways to bifurcate from libertarian normalizations of individualism and instead posit “playing with speculative cat’s cradle” as a prompt from Donna Haraway to collectively reckon with, re-imagine, and co-experiment with burgeoning forms of digital expression to shape otherwise thinking and future possibilities. Drawing from our respective fields of expertise (digital cultures; communications; history; gender, feminist, and women’s studies; environmental studies; writing and rhetoric; game studies), we examine the opportunities and limitations of Twine and reflect on the process of forming a feminist collaboration. We highlight processes and relationships rather than solely focusing on outcomes as a deliberate feminist intervention against neo-liberal results-oriented approaches to research and suggest that a component of feminist collaboration is being open to nonlinear, ongoing, and iterative work together.

Author Biographies

  • Anna Lee-Popham, University of Guelph

    Anna Lee-Popham is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph. Her poetry collection, Empires of the Everyday (McClelland & Stewart), was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her writing was first runner-up in PRISM international’s Pacific Poetry Prize, shortlisted for The Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Contest and Room's Poetry Contest, longlisted for CBC's nonfiction prize, and published in Arc, Brick, Canthius, Riddle Fence, Autostraddle, Lingue e Linguaggi, and others. Anna holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

  • Sarah York-Bertram, York University, York University

    Sarah York-Bertram is a graduate of the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies doctoral program at York University and is currently the Riley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Winnipeg in the History Department. In 2022, she co-organized the Feminist Digital Methods Events and Conference, which later became a Research Cluster,  at the Centre for Feminist Research. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Feminist Digital Methods book with Routledge Press.

  • Aparajita Bhandari, University of Waterloo

    Aparajita Bhandari is an assistant professor whose work sits at the nexus of critical internet studies, feminist media studies and cultural theory engaging in critical examinations of social media platforms with a focus on understanding instantiations of everyday or mundane online experiences as potential sites of resistance against hegemonic power.

  • Laurence Butet-Roch, York University, York University

    Laurence Butet-Roch is an environmental media scholar, photographer, and writer. Her work questions the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice, and extractivism through both academic research, and artistic and curatorial endeavours. Her doctoral project was awarded a Governor General Gold Medal and excerpts have appeared in RACAR, Visual Studies, Journal of Environmental Media, Facts & Frictions, as well as edited volumes.

  • Sarah Choukah, University of French Ontario

    Sarah Choukah is a transmedia artist and researcher, and assistant professor in digital communications and media studies at the Université de l'Ontario français in Toronto. Her research combines digital technologies with transdisciplinary practices across bioart, creative computing, interspecies collaboration, and feminist and posthuman approaches. She has a longstanding relationship with Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold that challenges anthropocentric notions of intelligence and invites alternative modes of decentered, more-than-human sensing and thinking. Her current work explores hybrid, modular, bioelectronic art gardens as experimental spaces, as well as modes of belonging and collective action at the margins of big tech, with a particular concern for minority francophone communities navigating predominantly anglophone digital systems.

  • Alison Harvey, Glendon College, York University, Glendon College, York University

    Alison Harvey is Associate Professor of Communications and the Director of the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including most recently in Feminist Media Studies, Diversity & Inclusion Research, Global Media & China, and New Media & Society. She served as the president of the Canadian Game Studies Association from 2023-2025 and is acting as a co-chair of the 2026 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

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Published

2026-01-22

Issue

Early View

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Original Research

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Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Lee-Popham, Sarah York-Bertram, Aparajita Bhandari, Laurence Butet-Roch, Sarah Choukah, Alison Harvey

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