Dr Anthea Moys: "A Carrier Bag of Tricks: Unwinnable Games and Other Ways to Build Trust"

An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Anthea Moys (British Council 90th Anniversary Research Fellow, 2025)

A Carrier Bag of Tricks: Unwinnable Games and Other Ways to Build Trust

What if we moved toward ‘survival of the friendliest’ instead of ‘survival of the fittest’? How might the socially restorative and relational power of play offer new tools for building trust? And what do we need in our carrier bags—our trust kits—to help us gather, listen, and re-story?

This postdoctoral project explores how play can function as a practice research method to build trust across communities in Scotland and South Africa shaped by histories of militarisation, colonialism, and structural inequality. Grounded in a reflexive, decolonial feminist approach and brought to life by my magpie-esque trickster ScotsSA baglady self—re-awoken here at IASH—the work is multi-modal in form. It draws inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s text The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1989), which invites us to move beyond heroic, linear narratives of conquest and instead imagine practice research methods as shape-shifting, receptive vessels that gather, hold, and sustain.

This work-in-progress focuses on two interlinked strands: The Carrier Bag of Tricks workshop for the creation of a toolkit, where we used playful, embodied, and unwinnable games to explore how trust grows in real time; and the development of a four-day public festival to sit alongside the Edinburgh Military Tattoo— a Tattoo Fringe, offering a critical space for reflection, healing, and re-storying the hero narrative through art, dialogue, and performance. So far, the project has centred on collaborative exploration with partners in UK and South Africa, with the next phase deepening work with the Keiskamma Art Project and SHADE in the Eastern Cape.