Anete Mikkala Camille Strand
Soil under my nails…
I grew up in a small village in the farmers land of Denmark. ‘Earth’s givings’ were well known to me from very early on. We picked up cow milk in a bucket from the next door farm and skimmed the cream ourselves. My parents ran a small Trucking and Construction company with a gravel pit as the center of the action. Like ‘Miss Smilla’s sense of snow’ (Peter Høeg) I knew 10 different kinds of soil before the age of five and knew how to dot down orders from people calling in over the phone: 2 m3 of ‘fine sand’, 4 m3 of ‘dirty pearls’, etc. Later during Highschool I learned to manage the machinery myself.
During my childhood I also listened to my father’s tellings about the going around of local politics. Since I was one year old he became engaged in county politics on behalf of the local workers union. He then balanced local politics as a social democrat with being a self-employed man – always siding with the downtrodden. Fighting for fairness. Some call it a paradox. For him it was common sense and reflecting his own childhood.
One piece of candy split in eight
My father was a true storyteller. In the evenings, after dinner, while my mother was in the background cleaning the kitchen, we sat at the kitchen table listening to him telling stories of this and that, of our lives, of his childhood life, of his parents life. Tales of the local. Each story having a word of advice, rules to live by. When I picture Benjamin’s storyteller I therefore picture my father.
One of my favorite stories was the story of how my father, six years old, ran several kilometers to the local store to get groceries for his mother. The store owner gave him a large piece of sweets for him to enjoy on the long walk home carrying a heavy burden. Although a treasure not often enjoyed, my father saved the piece of candy to be shared with the rest of his seven siblings at home. In a nutshell that is perhaps the founding story of him as a social democrat and how I was raised as a child. We were taught to share. Consequently, on the shadow side, there was shame in prioritizing yourself. My mother in particular suffered that cross and spent a life in the shadows of my father, as the devoted assisting wife to the patriarch. My shadow is that of breaking that pattern by staying single most of my adult life.
Becoming a Figure
As a child I loved pretend play, make-believe play. What-if play. Dressing up for the part and doing the choreography of the story. Paying great attention to the details of both plot, lines, cloth, accessories and artifacts. No wonder that I later theorized and are working with the scenographies of stories at Aalborg University.
At sixteen I was invited to contest in a beauty pageant of the largest town in the county by the hand of our next door neighbor. A sweet lady finding me pretty enough to match the girls of that larger town. From the start an entangled part of someone else’s agenda. I won the pageant after a period of turmoil from being a very shy girl having my face on boards on every telephone pole in the county for one whole summer in 1984. Anonymity gone afar. The following year my father became the Mayor of the Municipality and I thereby the Mayors daughter. A changed, double identity indeed from that of village girl and daughter of a small construction firm. Roles to play on the expense of simplicity and true innocence. Eaten away by the projections of so many strangers having an idea about who ‘she’ was or ought to be. And me struggling the balance of fitting the script as it was lined up, and holding on to ‘me’. From there I learned the hard way what it means to become ‘a figure’. Depicted so well by Donna Haraway (2008) when she claims:
Figures collect the people through their invitation to inhabit
the corporeal story told in their lineaments.
The Grandmother
Gaia is where I come from. Torn from the natural Gaia of my childhood, I grew into adulthood as more of a figure and only a person for the private few. One of these private few was my grandmother. The mother of my father. She was a vise, caring and strong women. Born in 1907. Having given birth to eight children during only 11 years and always struggling to make ends meet while her husband were busy gambling it all away on yet another fantastic deal. She had known the hardship of life and yet stayed warm and caring, and in turn she became wise on the human nature. My father attended thirteen schools during seven years of schooling. That’s how often they had to move. That’s how often she sat up home yet again.
Luckily my grandfather died relatively early at 62 years of age and made my grandmother a widow at 60 years of age. She never remarried, she chose to enjoy her freedom. She looked younger and more energized at 70 than at 40 years of age. She died shortly before her 97th birthday. She spent almost four decades as the beloved anchor of a large family, and enjoying life as she wanted it.
From the age of four I started spending every school break at her house. And I loved it. She introduced me to the wisdom of Mother Earth, Gaia, through her gardening practices and the heeling practices of drinking organic kefir milk from a kefir mushroom she kept in her refrigerator, as well as soothing the pains in her legs at night by rubbing an oil made from coal-sugar root. Just to name a few. I watched how people of all ages came to her for at talk, a kind word, an advice. She became my female role model and her son, my father was my male role model. Both shaping me as an earthy-person and partakers of an entangled genealogy indeed.
Queen of Care
I’ve had my personal adulthood drama of a troubling marriage and divorce, single motherhood, struggling to have ends meet through financial dept, illness and despite these circumstances, an insistence of prioritizing my calling to write a PhD and pursue a career fitted for me.
In summing up my life, I’ve gone through a movement from Daughter of Earth, over Figure of Beauty, to Queen of Chaos to slowly emerging within the last couple of years as Queen of Care with both feet back on the ground. A ‘settling’ that I am quite contend with and eager to carry on with this wonderful and diverse group of people.
Activities
Since 2012 I’ve been running the Material Story Lab at Aalborg University in Denmark where I serve as associate professor within ‘Interpersonal Communication, Organization and Materiality’. David Boje is the Godfather of the Lab in his manner of endorsing the lab’s main activity: Reconfiguring possibilities through building material reconfigurations of stories by placing small figurines and artifacts on a terrain board with sand. He served on the board of my PhD evaluation and played an important role of the acceptance of such alternate forms of research methods within Academia.
Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen supervised the PhD project and contributed greatly with his very distinct sense of tying storytelling, ethics and agential realism together.
Listed Publications
https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/106421/publications/
Strand, A. M. C. (2012). Enacting the Between: On dis/continuous intra-active becoming of/through an Apparatus of Material Storytelling. Book 1: Posing (an Apparatus of) Material Storytelling as discontinuous intra-active rework of organizational practices. PhD. Dissertation, Department of Communication & Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/enacting-the-between-on-discontinuous-intra-active-becoming-ofthr
Strand, A. M. C. (2012). Enacting the Between. On dis/continuous intra-active becoming of/through an Apparatus of Material Storytelling. Book 2: 'How to build an Oasis with a good conscience' - organizational becoming through an Apparatus of Material Storytelling. PhD. Dissertation, Department of Communication & Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark https://vbn.aau.dk/da/publications/enacting-the-between-on-discontinuous-intra-active-becoming-ofthr-2
Jørgensen, K. M., Strand, A. M. C., & Boje, D. (2013). Towards a Postcolonial-storytelling Theory of Management and Organization. Philosophy of Management, 12(1), 43-66. http://journals.libripublishing.co.uk/paper/towards-postcolonial-storytelling-theory-management-and-organisation
Strand, A. M. C. (2014). Material storytelling: Resituating language and matter in organizational storytelling. In K. Mølbjerg Jørgensen, & C. Largacha-Martinez (Eds.), Critical Narrative Inquiry: Storytelling, Sustainability and Power (pp. 73-104 ). Nova Science Publishers. https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=48710&osCsid=61e82445a28da3435d1539c8c5731683
Poulsen, S. B., & Strand, A. M. C. (2014). A creative designerly touch: Nurturing transformation through creativity in the meaning-mattering of design processes. Akademisk Kvarter, 9, 277-290. http://www.akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/pdf/vol9/21_SBolvigAStrand_ACreativeDesignerlyTouch.pdf
Strand, A. M. C. (2014). A Material Quantum Turn. In D. M. Boje, & T. Henderson (Eds.), Being Quantum : Ontological storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative (1 ed., Vol. 1, pp. 232-249). Cambridge Scholars Press. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/being-quantum
Strand, A. M. C., & Larsen, J. (2015). The Break: Work-life balance, energy and leadership anno 2015 - Reconfiguring contemporary leadership through 2400 years old coaching concept Protreptic and Material Storytelling. In D. M. Boje, & M. Sanchez (Eds.), The Emerald Handbook of Quantum Storytelling Consulting (pp. 187-210). Emerald Group Publishing.
Strand, A. M. C. (2018). Entangling Organizations: Intra-active ways of reworking the organizational scenography for the processes of becoming of the changed relationalities of (dis)ability. In D. M. Boje, & M. Sanchez (Eds.), The Emerald Handbook of Quantum Storytelling Consulting (pp. 187-210). Emerald Group Publishing.
Strand, A. M. C., & Henderson, T. L. (2019). Sociomateriality: The emergence of a new fractal of entangled engagements. In D. M. Boje, & M. Sanchez (Eds.), The Emerald Handbook of Management and Organization Inquiry Emerald Group Publishing.
In the pipeline
Jørgensen, K. M., Strand, A. M. C., Hayden, J., Larsen, J., & Sparre, M. (2020). Down to Earth: Gaia Storytelling and the Learning organization. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Strand, A. M. C (2020). Storytelling of the Possible. In Glavenau, V. (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan. In review.
Strand, A. M. C. (2021). Performance Scenography – and the allowance of the Human at Work – reorganizing matters of relationalities of sustaining sentient beings at work. In Jørgensen, K. M. (2021) (ed.) . Business Storytelling and Sustainability. New York: World Scientific Publishing. A volume in the book series Business Storytelling, edited by David M. Boje.
Favorite Books
Meeting the Universe Halfway – Quantum Physics and the entanglement of Meaning and Matter by Karen Barad
The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
Staying with the Trouble – making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Myths of Light – Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal by Joseph Cambell
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran