Abstract
Introduction
Sandplay has long been used by therapists to help patients move through sensitive topics and communicate more freely in the context of challenging experiences (Freedle, 2017; Lee, 2018; Pearson & Wilson, 2019). Unfolding alongside a conversation, the technique involves providing interlocutors with a tray of sand and offering them a choice of miniature figurines to incorporate into their stories.
In this paper, we reflect upon the methodological, ethical and practical implications of adapting narrative sandplay as a qualitative interview technique. The paper draws on a collaboration between Poh Lin, a narrative therapist who has long used sandplay in her therapeutic work, and two medical anthropologists, Tarryn and Catherine, who have over forty years of collective experience using qualitative research methods to study health and wellbeing.
The paper is structured in five parts. First, we outlined the history and epistemic origins of narrative sandplay. Secondly, we outline five methodological opportunities that are offered by the technique to qualitative research. Thirdly, we provide a practical step-by-step guide for practice. Fourthly, we explore researcher and participant reflections on the experience of narrative sandplay in a project on COVID border closures in Australia. Finally, we reflect on some limitations and considerations of the method.
This paper is intended as an interdisciplinary guide to narrative sandplay interviews. Importantly, however, we envision narrative sandplay as a subset of the ethnographic interview. Ethnography calls for a distinct orientation towards interviewing, which involves: the “humility [of taking people’s self-narratives seriously], a readiness to revise core assumptions about a research topic, attentiveness to context, relationality, openness to complexity, an attention to ethnographic writing, and a consideration of the politics and history of the method” (Trundle et al., 2024, p. 1). As we outline below, sandplay scaffolds this approach because of the inherent capacity of sand and play to be disruptive, embodied, relational and subversive.
Sand, Symbolism and the Epistemic Origins of Post-Structural Sandplay
Sand holds many meanings in the social imaginary. Given sand is a fluid mass made up of millions of individual grains, it embodies an existential metaphor and invites storytelling about one’s shifting place in the world (Welland, 2009, p. 2). Sand is a liminal form of matter, both hard and soft, flowing and solid, and thus allows reflection on complexity, contradictions, and multiplicities of meanings. The dynamic movement of sand offers symbolic insights about space – about mobilities and freedoms just as much as borders and confinement. Especially in an era of human-caused climate change, sand is at the centre of action when land erodes, or is reclaimed, or when sandbags are used to protect islanders from encroaching waters (Kothari & Arnall, 2020). Shifting sands therefore highlight the “complex temporal dynamics that undergird the notion of a border” (ibid, p. 313). Further, the politicisation of sand forms part of our collective identities. This is especially evident in the case of Australia, the ‘island continent’. Writing about Australia’s racialised policy to intercept and detain asylum seekers arriving by boat, Suvendrini Perera (2009) argues that Australia’s insular national identity is defined more by its “beachscapes” and “shifting coastlines” than the landmass itself. Sand is, thus, a site of inclusion and exclusion, of power and resistance.
Many cultures use sand for storytelling and as a way of connecting to place. In his book,
The sandplay session in therapy – like early incarnations of the ethnographic interview – is rooted in approaches that position researchers or therapists as ‘the experts’ who possess the skills to analyse what their ‘subjects’ are expressing about their lives. Jungian therapists, for example, are taught to analyse their patients’ trays using archetypal symbolism in order to guide them towards self-realisation and healing (e.g., Steinhardt, 2012). In contradistinction to the psy disciplines, narrative therapy is uncomfortable with Eurocentric and universalist approaches to symbolism, rejects the positivist notion of ‘objective’ analysis, and problematises the idea that there is a singular truth to be discovered by a method. Thus, like narrative research methods, in which both the researcher and the researched are considered part of the social processes under study (Moen, 2006; Spector-Mersel, 2010), narrative therapy implores its practitioners to be self-reflexive about their role in co-producing knowledge and meaning with their interlocutors.
The qualitative interview, for its part, has a long history of being extractive, and the relationship between researcher and researched “baked in” with colonial, gendered and class inequalities (Abu-Lughod, 2008; Smith, 1999). Recognition of such historically entrenched inequalities has led to methodological introspection and critique within the academy, especially from decolonial, feminist, queer, and disability scholars (e.g., Bartlett, 2007; Townsend & Cushion, 2021). Narrative therapy itself emerged in dialogue with these critiques: indeed, one of the founders of narrative therapy, David Epston, with a background in anthropology and social work, encouraged narrative therapists to have a political commitment to social justice and decolonisation, engage in robust reflexivity, and enter into genuine collaboration with interlocutors (Epston, 1999, 2014a).
It was through this reckoning that narrative therapists reconfigured the sandplay method within a post-structural frame (see Anderson & Goolishian, 1992; Lee, 2018). Poststructuralism rejects grand, positivist narratives of linear ‘progress’, ‘truth’ and ‘expert’ and rather understands meaning to be socially and culturally constructed, and mediated through discourse. Through this lens, identities and life stories are never fixed or static, but instead are relational, contextual, multiple, and ever-changing. Sand, moreover, moves in ways that align with poststructural ideas about identity and truth. As sand is fluid and resistant to permanent structures, it enables the unsettling of dominant narratives, and allows liminal movement towards forming new preferred structures and positions shaped by context and experience. In this way, we argue, sandplay can be a transformative medium through which to conduct an ethnographic interview that does not only serve the researcher.
Five Methodological Opportunities of the Narrative Sandplay Interview
There is an increasing array of creative ethnographic methods designed to foster more inclusive, reflexive, sensorial, and collaborative approaches to research, including photo-voice (Plunkett et al., 2013), creative visual methods (Farmer, 2017) and “soundscapes” (Russell & Rae, 2020). The narrative sandplay interview has a distinctive and complementary approach to add to these, due to five underlying principals we outline below.
Embedded Reflexivity
While reflexive practice is encouraged amongst qualitative interviewers (Rapley, 2001) it is compulsory and built in for narrative therapists. Supervision is a process built into most therapy training whereby therapists must undergo their own therapy sessions before they are licensed to practice. This experiential element helps practitioners to learn about the impact of the relational self in the therapeutic encounter (Grater, 1985). In line with this ethos, we propose that interviewers experience a narrative sandplay conversation themselves before conducting their own. This ensures researchers gain an embodied experience of the method and the situated, relational, and fluid way in which it generates reflections, as well as unearth hidden emotions related to the topic and their motivations for studying it. This in turn can also help clarify or problematise research questions, and draw to light ethical issues and potential power dynamics that might arise in the interview. For example, experiencing firsthand the unique pace and rhythm of sandplay interviews, and the crucial role of silence and occasional discomfort during the session, may prompt the researcher to consider new ways of holding space for their participants’ storytelling and adapt their interviewing practice accordingly. It is
Narrative sandplay, moreover, calls for a shift from observation to one of witnessing (Freedman, 2014). Rather than the interviewee being passively watched and analysed through the ‘gaze’ of the interviewer, they instead play a more active role as co-analyst. By experimenting with stories in the sand, participants are able to craft their own ways of visually representing themselves, gaze upon their own self-representations, and then erase, modify and recreate different kinds of narratives throughout the conversation. This ongoing, iterative and relational coauthorship helps to subvert the power dynamics often inherent in a research interview.
Multistoried People
Narrative sandplay encourages the questioning of dominant narratives through which peoples’ lives are usually cast. It enables people to connect their individual stories to – or disentangle them from – wider cultural and political narratives. Rather than conceptualising lives through linear, grand narratives, it allows people to narrate meaning in multiple ways, acknowledging the messy, conflicting and the contradictory. In other words, it allows bodies, and communities, to be
One of those dominant narratives that sandplay can help to untether is that of trauma and oppression. Although it is an important tool for describing and responding to suffering, trauma is also a socially constructed diagnosis and an individualised frame of reference for a wide range of relational human experiences. Trauma has, moreover, been highly politicised. As Trundle and Vaeau (2023, p. 446) summarise, “psychological and medical models of trauma […] are inseparable from the workings of state power, enactments of medical authority, legitimizing pathways to care, and political modalities of inclusion and exclusion”. Asylum seekers from the Global South, for example, are often forced to frame their life stories in the language of trauma in order to seek validation, legitimacy and humanitarian assistance - the retelling of which can itself be retraumatising. What constitutes trauma – and who is considered traumatised – is almost always contingent on verification by ‘experts’ (Fassin & d’Halluin, 2007). The engrained focus on victims of trauma silences modes of agency and resistance, and in doing so can reproduce biomedical and colonial power in hidden ways (Ibrahim, 2022).
By contrast, the fluid nature of sandplay can enable sensitive conversations to take place without forcing people to retell their experiences through these dominant narrative arcs. Poh Lin, for example, first encountered sandplay whilst attempting to respond to peoples’ experiences of seeking asylum in Australia and being held in detention. She became acutely interested in the ways that sandplay acted as an ally and collaborator within narrative therapy practices (Lee, 2013, 2018). Shapeshifting effortlessly, sand’s suppleness and capacity for unexpected movement is a gentle way of re-authoring traumatic experiences about “restriction [and] limited choice, agency, and movement” (Lee, 2018) without being retraumatising.
The ethnographer and the therapist are both interested in connecting individual stories to collective experiences – and contributing to a deeper understanding of the human condition. At the same time, ethnographic interviews are not therapy. It is important to delineate the distinction between sandplay in therapeutic contexts versus research contexts. In therapy, the participant tends to determine the direction of conversation in response to the specific (and often urgent) concerns they are facing in their lives. In ethnographic interviews, the researcher proposes the focus and shapes the contours of conversation, creates intentional space to engage with a specific theme of experience and takes up the responsibility to study the collected stories. There is, moreover, a different set of permissions. Although ethnographic researchers are also witnessing, documenting and engaging with participants’ storytelling, the therapist is trained to take a more active role in helping the person to disentangle dominant stories from subjugated stories, mutually understand how they’re linked with histories, and develop stories of response.
The Powerful Possibilities of Play
Play can benefit research, because of its affective power to produce ‘mutual experiences’ (Sanderud, 2020). Often considered the domain of children, play disrupts the dominance of ‘heady’, ‘adult’ ways of moving in the world and revalues how to engage with lived experience. Through play, people are invited to shed self-policing notions of how one
Play can also disarm preconceived notions of symbolism. Poh Lin for example, writes about a sandplay conversation in which a young woman noticed a donkey figurine (Lee, 2018). The woman began sharing about a statue of a donkey that her mother cherished and considered lucky. While listening, Poh Lin conjured ideas about what the donkey may have meant to her mother; particularly images of biblical and ancient donkeys. Poh Lin reflects, “Fortunately before I could get too tangled up in my ideas, the young woman brought me back down to earth by clarifying that the [cherished donkey statue] was from the movie Shrek!” (2018, p. 14)
Play also invokes new agentic forms of action in the story-telling process. As relational beings, we always self-select which stories we bring forward into shared and public spaces. However, the contours of the stories we can and do tell are usually shaped by discursive norms, and the presumed audience (Phillips et al., 2024). In sandplay, however, multiple stories can sit beside each other. Similar to the Aboriginal sand talk and ni-Vanuatu sand drawing examples above, people have agency over which stories they share in the sand, which they keep to themselves and which meanings they may find in the tray without narrating them aloud. In this way, sandplay offers extra possibility for complexity, liminality and meaningful silence.
Further, play can be safe. Themes or stories that in other contexts may be overwhelming, distressing and shocking can, in the carefully crafted play space, be held in different ways. Imagination and the surreal create safe passage to the unspeakable, not-yet-said and not-yet-understood (Lee, 2018). When people search for a figurine to place in the sand, exactness or factuality is no longer the goal; rather they are suspended in the desire to share and mould the story to their sense of satisfaction in the moment; satisfaction that it is true to their experience.
Finally, play decentres the verbal, offering interlocutors the chance to communicate through personally meaningful symbols. It thus moves away from the privileging of oral communication, and dethrones English as the dominant
Attunement to the Spatial
With sand, objects and movement as a core part of narrative sandplay, participants are encouraged to tell their stories by either drawing in the sand, placing miniature humans in relation to miniature animals, trees and/or built environments, or representing human actors through non-human objects. These spatial dynamics already invite participants to engage in a topic of ethnographic interest – that is, how humans and the more-than-human co-constitute social life, and the ways in which objects and spatiality are imbued with meaning and power (Chao, 2018; Dowling et al., 2017). This sets a tone for the rest of the interview, which – as we illustrate below - has a sharpened sensitivity to relationality and space. For example a person may tell a particular story to many different audiences – friends, colleagues, acquaintances – about a loved one going away. When story-telling in the sand with figurines, they are afforded a different position as not only storyteller but witness to the visual landscape of the story unfolding. Spatial distances in the sand, and the more-than-human nature of the figurines, may give rise to other meanings of the ‘going away’. This contributes to rich story development and invites a multi-storied telling of an otherwise singular dominant narrative of the experience (Dolman, 2015; White, 2007).
Recursive Dwelling
Writing up research material is fraught with the politics of representation. Researchers are often understandably “hesitant” about how they have portrayed their participants, and the potential negative consequences of writing about them (e.g., Chao, 2024). One way to maximise robust, critical and reflexive portrayals is to “recursively dwell” in the research material. As Trundle and Phillips (2024) note, recursive dwelling is to “return to experiences, ideas, and debates in order to expand, deepen, or nuance the meanings we assigned them” in dialogue with our participants.
Thus, a further methodological strength of narrative sandplay interviews is the richness of audio-visual material that emerges from the conversations and the recursive dwelling it affords. The audio-visual recording of the sand tray over the course of the interview provides a more sensorially rich way to re-enter the conversation after it has taken place. This enables the researcher to repeatedly return to the videoed sandtray in a more embodied way than simply re-reading a transcript. It allows them to spend time listening and witnessing, finding new insights, and interrogating their interpretations.
Further, a core principal of narrative sandplay is to share the audio-visual recordings with participants. This is partly for “member-checking” to ensure accuracy and participant comfort with the portrayal (Erdmann & Potthoff, 2023). More than this, however, it is a way of recognising that conversations recorded during research are more meaningful than simply “data” to be extracted and analysed. Rather, they are relational moments that can hold many different meanings in people’s lives, meanings that are multiple and subject to change. Just like the researcher, participants may also wish to spend time in these conversations later.
A Practical Guide to Narrative Sandplay Interviews
The border closure case study offers a grounded, practical example of how narrative sandplay interviews can accompany research. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020–2022, most countries throughout the globe used border closure as a public health response to stop the virus spreading, which ultimately produced a new border regime (Radil et al., 2021). While the Australian government closed its national borders for the first time since the Spanish flu, the states and territories also closed their borders to each other, causing inter-state tensions and producing profound and unequal impacts (Stobart & Duckett, 2022). People living across state borders, or confined within Australia’s borders, were unable to see loved ones nor return home for meaningful events such as weddings and funerals. Special exemptions were available, but granted in racialized and class-based ways: an Ombudsman’s report found that Victoria’s border permit decisions were “downright unjust, even inhumane” (Eddie, 2021). Undergirding these controversies was a dark history in which the borders themselves were already settler-colonial constructs imposed over the top of sovereign Indigenous nations. Moreover, the spatial governance of disease outbreaks in Australia has often tended towards harsher public health restrictions for First Nations and migrant communities (Bashford, 2003). Given these heightened border politics, this project sought to collect narratives about how people experienced this period in Australia’s history. Focusing on people in Victoria and Western Australia, the research questions were,
Tarryn and Poh Lin conceived, experimented with and refined narrative sandplay as an interview technique throughout 2021, when they themselves were locked down, homeschooling children and separated from loved ones across state and international borders. After approval by the La Trobe University Human Research Ethics Committee, Tarryn recruited participants with experiences of separation during border closure, using the snowball method. She held narrative sandplay interviews with 13 people across the two states who ranged in age between their 30s and 70s, came from a range of backgrounds including Australian-born people of European descent (referred to as settlers) (
Equipment
Equipment for Narrative Sandplay Interviews.
Ethical Considerations and Recruitment
Ethical considerations around consent and the recruitment process for narrative sandplay interviews are not dissimilar to any other ethnographic interview. However, in addition to consent for audio recording the interview, further consent is required for the researcher to take (de-identified) video of the conversation, with only the sand creations and their hands visible on the screen. Moreover, given narrative sandplay is traditionally used in therapeutic contexts, it is crucial to articulate (to the ethics committee, and in the information provided to participants) that sandplay is not intended as therapy in this context but rather as an accompaniment to storytelling. If participants are likely to have experienced vulnerability and trauma – which is not uncommon in qualitative interview projects – the usual careful attention should be paid to the ethics of care and self-care during and after the interview (Thompson, 1995). We recommend compensating participants with an appropriately costed payment or voucher, because, although incentivising participation is somewhat fraught (Head, 2009), it is nonetheless important to recognise participants’ generosity in sharing their time and stories.
The Interview Schedule
It is crucial to explain to participants that what they do in the sand is entirely up to them. Here is an example excerpt from the preamble to the border closure conversations : You can do anything with the sand. You can sift it through your fingers, you can draw in it, or you could use any of the figurines that you see there in front of you. When you add something or you make a movement in the sand – if it doesn’t feel right to you or if it doesn’t feel close to your experience – then feel free to move it. The process is entirely led by you, and there’s no right or wrong way to be with the sand. The other thing that it’s important for you to know is that I won’t be scrutinizing what you choose based on any kind of universal symbolism. So if you choose a bird, you choose a bird. You are welcome to tell me why you chose that bird, what it means to you, or why you’ve put it there.
It is also necessary to enable participants to feel at ease with the sand and figurines. We recommend the first question be an invitation to participants: First, I would like to invite you to come in to meet the sand - if you want to – and just place your hands on the sand lightly. You may feel the texture, or whether it’s cool or warm. You might notice how your hands meet the sand. Is there anything you notice?
This often evokes an embodied response, whereby people begin to compare or contrast it with other sands they are familiar with, such as that of beaches or lands close to home. It sets a spatial and temporal overture to their stories.
Questions asked during narrative sandplay are different to regular interviewing questions. Rather than asking, for example, how people first became aware of the pandemic, we might instead ask, “How did the pandemic first show up in your everyday life?” This prompts participants to think about how they might situate their experiences in the context of a broader life narrative.
Similarly, instead of asking participants directly about their experiences that align with the research topic, we instead introduce open-ended
Another crucial line of questioning to periodically return to in a narrative sandplay conversation is, “what do you notice when you look at the tray? What meanings are emerging for you?” This shifts the gaze from the researcher ‘finding out’ the person’s stories and experiences, to a collaborative process where the person becomes a co-analyst and co-researcher. In line with the ethos of post-structural sandplay, this re-positions people as the experts of their own lives.
After witnessing someone share a difficult experience in the sand, it is crucial to allow people to retell it in a different way, to change things, or focus on another element in the tray. Central to narrative therapy is the need to allow people to re-author disempowering experiences and imagine alternate possibilities. It is restorative to ask, for example, “how would you have
And finally, an important question to end with is, “what has it been like for you to share your experiences through sand and story today?” This is a crucial part of the embedded reflexivity of narrative sandplay, wherein the researcher continually reflects on their practice in dialogue with their interlocutors.
Reflections on Sandplay: Lessons Learned From the COVID Border Closure Study
For Tarryn, the narrative sandplay conversations required an additional set of skills to the ethnographic interviews she has conducted in the past. The added sensorial element made space for what Freedle (2017) calls, “mindful participation”. This meant learning to be more comfortable with silence and long pauses, and witnessing moments in participants’ lives in ways that extended beyond listening. Rather than reporting findings or themes below, we instead highlight the novel insights derived from the method itself.
Moving Through Restricted Mobility
The open-ended questions and the act of moving in the sand automatically prompted participants to reflect on the relationship between bodies and borders across space and time. When introducing the theme of border closure into the tray, numerous participants made historical comparisons with wars and authoritarian regimes. Poppy, for example, who lives in Melbourne with her young family, was separated from her parents in Western Australia during much of the pandemic. In the tray, she represented her partner and children with various miniature animals, cordoned off by a miniature fence. She spoke of comparisons with the Berlin Wall, a border that prior to the pandemic had felt purely hypothetical to her. During an earlier holiday to Berlin, she had struggled to understand “how a barrier could kind of go up overnight”, and remembered thinking, “if you just really wanted to be with your girlfriend or your family, why wouldn’t you just go and move there before the border [went up]?” Poppy went on to say that the closure of the Australian border evoked an intimate understanding of the insidious speed and scale of political change. Idly touching the fence in the tray, she said, “I was just blown away that I could be in that position myself, having literally wondered before how anyone could be separated from their family.”
Lila, who had come to study in Australia from her home country Nepal just prior to the pandemic, was separated from her young children for three and a half years as a result of the COVID border closures. In the tray, she positioned the figures representing her family facing a solitary, unforgiving “No Entry” sign. Lila described her visceral feelings of frustration as she sought to navigate not only the border restrictions, but also the Australian government’s often racialised visa hurdles. And when my visa expired, then it automatically made [my children’s] dependent visa invalid. So that was another part where I got frustrated and things were like, No. No. No. No. No. No - here, everywhere. It gives me feelings, sometimes it gave me [the] feeling that I would never [get] to see them again. So it becomes the gap between normal.
Accompanied by the tray, Lila’s narration of this experience was especially attuned to her body in space and time, as she navigated through “here” and “there” as well as “gaps” and the possibility of “never”. The pain of the separation, she explained, had such an impact on her body that she developed an eating disorder.
The moment came, three and a half years later, when Lila was eventually able to organise visas for her family. In the tray, she moved her family figurines in front of a balsa wood house, to illustrate the moment at which she met them at the airport (see Figure 1). To express the relief of finally reuniting, she gently placed a small globe in the sand, describing it as “like a world coming together”. Lila’s Tray Depicting Family Unable to Enter Australia (Top) and the Eventual Reunion (Bottom).
Empowering Play
The nonconformist element of play, coupled with the question, “what would you have
Poppy similarly spoke of imagining ways to circumvent or surpass the border restrictions. She too dug a tunnel in her tray with a miniature shovel, to talk about the relationship she began to develop with the border: I found myself fantasizing all the time about ways that I could cross the border. […] I would just think about things all the time, tunneling under. And then I would also often think about how truck drivers were coming in and out […] so I was always thinking, “Well, surely you could just sort of pay a truck driver and have them just scoot you across the border as part of one of their deliveries.” And it felt a bit deranged to be thinking these things, you know?
Some people explained through the sand how they responded to the sense of oppression by finding solace in spirituality and re-connecting to nature. This was the case for Fumiko, who had been deeply upset at being unable to attend her son’s wedding in Japan (see Figure 2). At one powerful moment during the session, she cleared the tableau she had made in the tray and smoothed out the sand, lying her figurine-self down beside a coffin. Fumiko’s Tray Depicting (Top) Her Separation From Her Son, and (Bottom) How a Spiritual Approach Helped Her to Cope With the Restrictions.
Her strategy, she explained, was to spend time looking at the stars, which helped her to put her life into broader perspective with the universe. Night time, I went out and… lots of stars, nobody there. I took off the mask and [was] just thinking “la, la, la” with the freedom, and then quietly come back. Those kind of thing I did. Me and universe, me and universe. […] Like that song, nobody or no religion, no boundary, nothing, me and world, me and universe, me and sky. And so it’s a bit of spiritual experience free from all these things. Yes, restrictions there, but my spirit want to be free. That kind of feeling, yes.
The juxtaposition between the busy-ness of Fumiko’s previous tray and the minimalism of the next poignantly illustrated her renewed sense of peace and spiritual perspective.
All three of these examples – digging, hiding in trucks, and lying beside a coffin - are situated in the surreal, the imaginative and the other-worldly. They highlight narrative possibilities that playfully outwit or rise above the physical restrictions of borders - forms of agency that were able to be enacted through the sand.
New Possibilities for Solidarity
There is a meta element to sandplay, in which the tray reflects participants’ constructed worlds back to them. In this way, awareness can “expand through the senses” (Freedle, 2017), revealing new ways of disentangling and finding new meanings.
In the border closure project, movement in the sand seemed to foster in participants from settler backgrounds a more acute understanding of their privilege. For Sue, a grandmother in regional Western Australia, border closures meant restricted mobility for the first time in her life and separation from her children and grandchildren. To describe how COVID crept up on her, she placed a reptile in the sand: “It was just sneaking along, a bit like a snake slithering along in the beginning. Does that make sense?” She went on to narrate an experience where, during a visit to finally reunite with her grandchildren in Victoria, a new wave of COVID led to Western Australia shutting its borders. This meant she was briefly denied re-entry to her home state, an experience that was deeply unsettling: “without home, you’re rootless or baseless.” She went on to say it gave her a heightened appreciation for “the refugees and the people in war-torn countries that can never get back there.”
Beth, who lived on a large property in south-Western Australia, surrounded her miniature family in the tray with plentiful flowers, plants and fruit. She reflected on how grateful she was to have been largely self-sustainable in a time of economic precarity. Even though she felt the pain of distance from two family members who were unable to return home from interstate and overseas, she was also attentive to privilege: “our lives weren’t that restricted. So it was easy. […] I guess we just felt incredibly lucky.”
Poppy, moreover, used the sand to reflect on her experience of witnessing inequalities in her neighbourhood during the pandemic. In 2021, the Victorian state government imposed a lockdown on four housing commission towers. A heavy police presence surrounded the apartment blocks to prevent the mostly poor, Indigenous and migrant residents from leaving, while others in the same suburb were allowed to move with relative freedom. Poppy’s interpretation of this inequality played out in her tray, where she placed all of the brown-skinned figurines behind a stop sign (see Figure 3). She then crafted a line of people to represent those who separately protested on the street against vaccination and mask-wearing equirements. Poppy’s Tray Depicting (Top) Her Nuclear Family Outside Their House and Garden While a Lockdown is Imposed on Nearby Housing Commission Residents and (Bottom) the Anti-Vaccination Protests.
Although Poppy was evidently already reflecting on racialized inequalities (she chuckled, “I’m purposely kind of choosing white-ish manikins”), she also noted that externalising these thoughts in the sand intensified her awareness: I guess it really heightens the sort of tragedy, seeing it in the sand […] I guess I found it kind of, I don’t know, weirdly surprising, really poignant seeing the people of those public housing towers cordoned off into a tiny corner. It’s not like I don’t know it’s powerful in general, because it was sad. But just seeing it, you’re kind of like, “Shit, that is fucking … That’s really sad.”
When Tarryn talked with Poppy about this comment many months later, she said, “I stand by it. It [the memory of the tableau] still makes me tear up.” In retrospect, she said, part of her reaction was because the tragedy felt all the more heightened when demonstrated through children’s toys. Thus, a striking takeaway of trialling narrative sandplay was how it nurtured increased awareness of the self in relation to others, and, in this case, sharpened appreciation for the unequal impacts of “border imperialism” (Walia, 2013).
Participant Reflections on Narrative Sandplay Experiences
Most participants reported that the sand tray conversations were restorative for them, and particularly so for those who had experienced extreme hardship during the border closures. Although the border closures were now behind Lila and her family, her eyes glistened with tears at numerous times during the session. When Tarryn asked, “what has it been like sharing your experiences through sand and story today?”, Lila explained: Well, this is a very new experience to me […] I think I didn’t do much justice to the sand playing, but it feels good that I can change things. And it gives me less stress when talking. The thing is it’s less stressful because you get distracted through moving the sand. And yeah, I couldn’t use more props, but I think it’s really good to have this as a stress reliever […] I get emotional, but still it takes away some of my emotions and make[s] me calm […]
For Lila, playing in the sand, and being able to “change things” had a calming effect, which made it easier for her to reflect upon a difficult time in her life. This reaffirms how sandplay can accompany painful memory in safe ways.
Isabella also deeply appreciated the narrative sandplay experience. For Isabella, border closure meant she was unable to return to her home country in Europe. She spoke of the pain of separation from her adult children and a sense of guilt that she had “abandoned” her elderly mother in a nursing home facility. And yet, the sandtray conversation also prompted Isabella to reflect on the many positive elements of her life during and after the pandemic, including the regional community that embraced her in Australia, and, after borders reopened, trips back to Europe to see cherished old friends. Isabella said that sharing her story through sand was: Cathartic. It’s good to go through it again […] what’s the point of keeping it to myself? If it’s something sad or hurting or the negative side, when you keep it inside, it gets rotten and it doesn’t help at all. You need to take it out and make changes. When you have it out here, you say, “Well, but it’s not so bad.” When it’s in here [points to herself] it’s all black, it’s huge, and you cannot reach the edge - never. [But] when you put it out [points to the tray], there is light […] The good things they just come up like bubbles.
Isabella’s comments evoke the theory of sandplay, emphasising the therapeutic nature of externalising experiences and the ability to change experiences of restriction and oppression.
Importantly, some people were reticent to begin working in the sand or demonstrated an initial hesitance about which figurines they were choosing and why. When people placed symbolic animals in the sand, they would often ask, “does that make sense?” or “do you know what I mean?” Other participants found the release from exactness unsettling at first. Some perused the figurines and lamented the lack of a miniature laptop or smart phone to represent their increased use of technology during this period. (They eventually chose objects to be emblematic of technology, such as a bridge or a globe).
During Tarryn’s first tray with Poh Lin, she began by thinking less as a participant and more as a researcher about how she would later analyse her own tray. She worried that she was being too literal when she placed an elderly female figurine in a coffin upon the sand to represent her grief at being unable to return to Western Australia for her grandmother’s funeral. When approaching the task cerebrally, Tarryn double-guessed her own figurine choices. Reflecting on it later, she said to Poh Lin: there were things that I knew I was getting because of the universal symbolism. Like, I was kind of cynical. And I was [thinking], “Oh, I’m getting a bridge [to demonstrate a way to surpass a border], of course I am!” or “I’m getting a fence [to demonstrate a barrier]”.
During the course of the session, however, she eventually stopped self-policing. Later, she sought to illustrate the comfort she drew during the pandemic when recalling strong female ancestors who had experienced separation from loved ones during the first and second world wars. These included a Nanna who, as a bored housewife, had danced on a tabletop in front of her bemused children to “spice things up a bit”. Immersed in this story-telling, Tarryn unthinkingly brought the elderly figurine that had been laid to rest earlier back to life, and, for want of a table, made her dance on top of the miniature coffin. It wasn’t until afterwards, when Poh Lin pointed out this moment, that Tarryn realised how she had wholeheartedly begun to
Fumiko, for whom English was a second language, was reflexive about how playing in the sand enabled her to tell her story in a more authentic way, in contrast to writing or speaking: And I didn’t realize if I write down, maybe I edit. If I speak, I hesitate. But if I put [something in the sand], I can’t hide, I cannot hide. You see, because already I put it. So it’s a really honest and also a little bit childlike, innocent when I put it. That is really magic of this, I think sand play. It’s not much sense.
For Fumiko, sandplay allowed her freedom from the pressure to “make sense”, which enabled her to move away from self-editing. Moreover, she felt that the act of placing things in the sand made her more honest with herself about her lived experiences.
Modes of Engagement
Even in the use of creative methodologies, it is important not to methodologically ‘gloss’ over awkwardness or power dynamics that may still be present in the research process (Rapley, 2001). While most participants in the border closure project relished using the sand to accompany their stories, two interlocutors remained uncomfortable with the method. Two participants in their 70s, Greg and Gena, preferred to avoid the sand, even after some gentle prompting such as, “is there something you would feel moved to do in the sand, to demonstrate this experience?” Greg didn’t touch the sand at all. Gena began with a figurine or two, but quickly stated that she would “prefer to verbalise it”. In these cases, Tarryn shifted to a regular conversational style of interview, and the stories they shared about border closure were less embodied, but nonetheless meaningful. This experience highlights how interviewer flexibility and attentiveness to levels of discomfort is crucial. Especially in a research context about restriction and powerlessness, the opportunity for participants to refuse a method is not just an issue of consent, but also enables agency and resistance. Thus, when sandplay does not respond to context, it is important for researchers to offer different modes of engagement.
Limitations and Considerations
Each sandplay conversation produces a wealth of audio-visual material, which makes smaller sample sizes (between 5–15 participants) more feasible. The method is not conducive to broad generalisations on the basis of demographic information. For example, Tarryn had intended to contrast people’s experiences of border closure across ethnicity, gender, regional/urban and socio-economic circumstance. While these aspects of identity undoubtedly shaped experiences and occasionally came up in conversation, the highly idiosyncratic way in which each conversation unfolded meant they were not easily mapped onto stories. Rather than facilitating replicability, the value of sandplay lay in the opportunities it afforded for in-depth, contextualised analysis about the ways people ascribed meaning to that period in their lives.
Sandplay is more resource-heavy and time-intensive than regular ethnographic interviews, which may be prohibitive for some. While the video footage captures changes in participants' trays over time, some of this temporal richness can be lost through publishing still images, as we have done here. There is scope, however, to explore alternative and ethical formats for exhibition of sandplay footage in a way that does justice to the fullness and multiplicity of people’s stories.
Conclusion
Narrative sandplay interviews are a valuable method to add to the qualitative toolkit. Inherently ethnographic, the method offers five methodological strengths, including attunement to: embedded reflexivity; multistoried people; the powerful possibilities of play; space and materiality; and recursive dwelling. The method is resource-heavy and time-intensive, and discomfort from a minority of participants needs to be sensitively handled. In all, however, we found that it offered rich, restorative potential for both researchers and participants.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
ORCID iDs
