Embodied methodologies: contributions and challenges to the field

Presenting author: Genevieve Blades 

This presentation offers a (re)vision of walking via a (re)presentation of the researcher's/researched sensing, affecting walking body, with/in selected environments/scapes of nature in south eastern Australia, undertaken as part of a PhD study. The methodological challenge was how to access these elusive intercorporeal 'field sites' of walking as embodied movements and intra/interactive moments with/in scapes of nature. An autophenomenographic approach was used and framed ecophenomenologically, in order to explore how the subjectivity of the researcher/walker can be decentred in 'less' anthropocentric thinking about and, representing of, the 'nature' of walking in various environments, nature(s)/scapes.

Empirical 'scoping' of material, aesthetic and embodied dimensions were inductively identified and abductively assembled as descriptive interpretations of walking with/in scapes of nature. The 'findings' reveal the nature of walking as ontologically relational spatial practices, and as temporal events such as "wandering" and "wayfaring" in local places, or "bushwalking" along granite outcrops. It was found that these "encounters" occurred over different time-space settings, scapes, ecological affordances, and repeat episodes.

The study de and reconstructs the activity of bushwalking as understood in Australia, unsettling patriarchal and colonial assumptions. Ethical and political (in)tensions are brought to bear on questions of who gets to walk where, how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics we can make.

Presenting author: Nicole Gombay (Université de Montréal)

Imagine that your sensory world is transformed. Sights, sounds, balance, and a host of other senses about which you were previously unaware, make themselves felt in new and destabilising ways. Such is the experience of people with Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs).

Binding together corporeal and cognitive significations, the senses involve not only interaction with things external to the body, but also, through the senses, outer worlds permeate and shape inner ones. Rather than being clearly delimited entities standing apart from the world, people with TBIs come to know through their senses that they are in the world and the world is in them. The body is thus an inflection point, linking inner and outer spaces.

People may perceive the ways in which their bodies are immersed in fields of vibration which they absorb, transmit, and diffuse. So sound, light, and movement can produce deeply dissonant bodily reactions.

Using autoethnography, the presentation will explore bodily experiences of vibration. It will consider the point of inflection as inner and outer worlds are conjoined through the body, and reflect upon what this might suggest for our understandings of space..

Presenting author: Alice McSherry (University of Auckland)

Other authors: Amba J. Sepie (University of Canterbury)

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the concept of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship, o Te Taiao, of the environment, has often been fraught with misunderstandings and forgetting derived from an incomplete notion of what Earth is and how to embody relationship with Her. This amnesia filters into and informs the taken-for-granted conceptualisations of how we do and shape geography as a discipline. In this paper we present the cross-culturally salient concept of kaitiakitanga as a means of extending our obligations of relationship to all human and more-than-human companions with whom we share places with/in Earth in research practice.

The cultivation of kincentric ecological relations is an embodied deep connection with, a personal commitment to, and a responsibility for, all Life-a necessary turning toward one another-human or non-human-to learn how we might secure peaceful and abundant relations for our collective planetary futurity. How might we cultivate a more-than-intellectual, direct and intuitive, yet ecologically grounded attention to/care for those with whom we share a habitat? How do we embody a stance that both decolonises these relationships and avoids additional misunderstandings or appropriation? This paper reimagines geographies in just this way.

Presenting author: Francisco Gelves (University of the Sunshine Coast)

Other author: Jennifer Carter (University of the Sunshine Coast), Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne), Shannon Brincat (University of the Sunshine Coast)

Conservation-oriented social sciences researching human-Nature dynamics generally focus on predictions via quantitative mechanisms. Their intentions relate to directly influencing socio-ecological processes and outcomes. This has led to perspectives and practices that necessarily limit a plurality of values and knowledge, effectively capturing conservation within a scientistic dogma. Through an engagement with relational ontologies present in scholarly projects such as more-than-human geographies, or the epistemologies of the South through ideas such as 'el sentipensar' (Feeling-Thinking), I reflect, instead, on my experience using more-than-representational ethnography as a research methodology within the Whitsundays and the Great Barrier Reef, and in the context of adaptive management. This necessarily also requires engaging with the challenges and opportunities when navigating embodied more-than-human research.

Different forms of studying protected areas management can add nuance and complexity to reflect about human-Nature relationships, the embodied and embedded realities of protected areas and biodiversity conservation. For example, El sentipensar acknowledges the power of humans to recognise science and reason are not exclusive in the ways humans engage with and transform everyday activities alongside nonhumans. Feeling can be valuable in rethinking not just methodologies, but also adaptive management for the 21stC; re-ordering experiences associated with other ways of knowing, to reimagine the meaning of protected areas, and ultimately the messiness of the Nature/culture binary.

Presenting author: Anna Dunn (University of Sydney)

In 2018 Parks Victoria imposed rock-climbing access bans in the Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park in response to Traditional Owners' concern that climbing was damaging cultural heritage values. Some of the Australian and international climbing community have pushed back against the bans, deepening rifts between Traditional Owners, land managers, and climbers over what constitutes appropriate protection of, and relationships with, rocky places. In this presentation I bring together scholarship on rock climbing, geontologies (Povinelli, 2006; 2016) - namely, scholarship that destabilises governance of the ontological difference between Life and Nonlife - and Indigenous-settler relations to explore a particular case of Aboriginal cultural heritage management in Australia.

I consider how embodied modes of knowing and relating with rock might erode, transgress, and transform Indigenous-settler relations in well-loved rocky places. I will reflect on these questions through my own experience as a white settler rock climber attempting to reconfigure the ways in which I know and love Gariwerd.

Presenting author: Cathy Robinson (CSIRO)

Other authors: Jennifer Mairi Macdonald (CSIRO-CDU Fellow), Michael Douglas (University of Western Australia), Justin Perry (NAILSMA), Samantha Setterfield (University of Western Australia), Dennis Cooper (Northern Land Council), Maria Lee (Traditional Owner), Johnathan Nadji (Traditional Owner), Sean Nadji (Traditional Owner), Alfred Nayinggul (Traditional Owner, Anita Nayinggul (Traditional Owner), Kenneth Mangiru (Traditional Owner), Fred Hunter (Kakadu Park Ranger), Bessie Coleman (Traditional Owner), Ryan Barrowei (Traditional Owner), Joe Markham (Traditional Owner, Jessie Alderson(Traditional Owner), Feach Moyle (Kakadu National Park), Kadeem May (Kakadu National Park), Michael Bangalang (Traditional Owner)

This paper will provide an empirical account of an education system's attempt to use machine learning. The education system has used external consultants to look at identifying causal factors and what could be changed to make a difference to enduring inequities in educational outcomes. This paper is interested in whether this policy experiment in causality creates new, dispersed, spaces of policy making through the use of machine learning. The paper looks at how the use of Artificial Intelligence may be transforming the sites of policy making in education as both human and posthuman.

The paper will outline how data scientists use a combination of techniques that make explicit the assumptions that make up calculation, from the field of causal inference, with techniques from ML that depend on machine, but not human, interpretable calculations that can be framed as posthuman decision-making spaces. To connect AI, policy spaces and agency the paper uses Roden's (2015) ideas of self-augmenting systems, that are neither controllable nor in control. In a lack of decisive control lies the possibility of exploring whether an experiment in policy certainty, that is neither controlled or deterministic, will create new policy spaces and new kinds of machine/ (post)human policy learning.

Presenting author: Blanche Verlie (University of Sydney)

Other authors: Astrida Neimanis (University of British Columbia)

Climate catastrophe is neither an object nor a discrete event, but a radical disruption in planetary patterns of relating in which human bodies are enmeshed. As such, it is a profoundly unsettling trauma that we can feel in deeply embodied ways. However, this experience complicates sedimented understandings of both bodies and climate change as discrete entities or phenomena. Grounded in intersectional environmental feminism, this paper explores the possibility of witnessing climate catastrophe, where both trauma and witnessing are relational and more-than-human. We explore this through the devastating bushfires, chronic smoke pollution and contaminated waterways of Australia's 2019-2020 Black Summer and the more-than-human respirational crises they connect to.

We develop a methodology of attuning to embodied experiences of breath as a more-than-human mode of witnessing climatic and other related forms of multispecies injustice. This practice reveals how colonisation, white supremacy, global capitalism, misogyny, erotophobia and body hatred materialise in our mundane everyday lives as the very air we (cannot always) breathe, and articulates how witnessing bodies are already co-constitutive of the phenomena to which they bear witness.

Presenting speaker: Victoria Radnell (Monash University)

Globally, cities are rapidly expanding and densifying. This growth is not just seen laterally, but also vertically, as cities look for ways to manage increasing populations and the required infrastructure to support this. Just as above ground development of skyscrapers and apartment blocks ensure that businesses and people can be housed within a city, tunnels are also becoming a common infrastructure solution to ensure continued access to the city. Yet while subterranean mobility remains a common feature of the city, there is limited scholarly insights regarding the experiences associated with underground travel and how this might relate to and influence experiences of the city.

Drawing on the scholarly foundation of Stephen Graham and by undertaking a case study of Melbourne's City Loop, this paper proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding commuters' perceptions of verticality. It aims to explore this framework and its uses to better understand people's experiences of mobility and connection to the city around them. In doing so this paper moves verticality away reading the structures of the city, to acknowledging how the subterranean strata is lived.