Capacious Methodologies for an Unravelling World: Three Research Ecologies

Abstract

In this article, we take Dan Harris’ conceptualization of creative ecologies as a provocation to think individually and collectively across three very different research ecologies and the methodologies we use to navigate them. The three research ecologies originate with slippery eels and multispecies ethnography around the Hawkesbury River (New South Wales); affective filmmaking and experience of gender in Australian secondary schools: and the sociomaterialities of living and researching with/in a small girls school on a Himalayan mountainside. We articulate something of these diverse projects, asking what the concept of creative ecology does in our research practice. Together we ask: What work does inhabiting creative ecologies as concept do; and what does thinking with/in creative ecologies mean for our research work? Finally, we speculate how re-conceptualizing research as creative ecologies might offer more capacious ways to address issues of conceptual, cultural, and ecological justice in this unravelling world.

Part 1: Theorizing Creative Ecologies of Research Practice

Dan Harris (2021) argues that all ecologies are creative, defining creativity as expansive, dynamic, and situated, such that the human is but one of many agentic forces with/in a field of relationality co-creating each moment. In thinking about creativity, they invite us to move beyond human exceptionalism and toward the recognition of the ecological nature of all life (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022), and contend by extension that in this planetary moment, we must engage with the climate crisis and with Indigenous knowledges (Harris, 2022). In this article, we explore what thinking with creative ecologies in relation with our own research praxes might produce.

Broadly located in the field of Education, we three authors come from different methodological strands of qualitative research: arts-based inquiry, multispecies ethnography, and intercultural ethnography. What we have in common are place (Western Sydney University), conceptual space (a cohort of researchers focused on postqualitive inquiry for planetary wellbeing), and philosophical affinities (feminist new material and posthuman/relational ways of knowing). In taking up postqualitative approaches in our work, we attempt to: “imagine and accomplish an inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (Lather, 2013, p. 653). Our aim then is not to discover, interpret, and represent what is, but “to think thought and being differently” (St. Pierre, 2021, p. 165) through experimental engagement with material worlds. We see this approach, not as an outright abandonment of qualitative methodologies and methods but as a teasing out into some of Lather’s (2013) “thousand tiny methodologies” (p. 635).

In thinking with Harris’ concept of creative ecologies in this collaboration, in Part 2, we each articulate something of our particular research, seen through an ecological lens. Prue takes up the notion of making-room for all as subjects, turning her attention to relationalities of human-nature and the human-human in virtual COVID times, as well as in the gendered spaces of her research: while Jen takes it up as a sensory multispecies imaginary in a eelish riverine ecology, replete with histories and human cultures. Both include the spacetime mattering of Australian Indigenous histories and presences. Susan inhabits the everyday relationalities of an intercultural space in India, sharing the delicate hospitalities of otherness through ongoing traces—of memory, imagination, and affect. Our work is woven together by the weft of relational and ecological onto-epistemology and an ethical commitment of response-ability to the other.

Finally, in Part 3, together we ask, “What does inhabiting creative ecologies as concept do?” “What does thinking with/in creative ecologies mean for our research work?” We speculate how thinking with/in creative ecologies might offer more capacious ways to engage with issues of conceptual, cultural, and ecological justice in educational research. After Harris (2021), we offer “a map [of our thinking and doing] not a representation. It is a trail of breadcrumbs through human and posthuman creative thinking and acting, but like all trails it may be washed away with the first rain.” (p. 17).

The Creativity of Ecologies

In conceptualizing creativity itself, we choose to think apart from capital’s desire to commodify it, moving away from “dominant, orthodox ways of classifying, organising and explaining the world” (Bogue, 2004, in Jeanes, 2006, p. 131). While in a capitalist context, creativity is treated as a “something,” as a value in itself (Thrift, 2000), Whitehead (1929/1978) much earlier had pointed out that creativity is in itself a neutral dynamism, caring not what it produces. It is humans, particularly in a neo-liberal era, that define and discipline creativity as something something with value. And so in a rewilding of creativity (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022), we adopt Deleuze’s nomadic thinking: creating new connections, opening up experience to new becomings, in a multiverse of thinking differently.

Early empiricists saw creativity as an inherent property of fluid ecologies, with Dewey (1934/1958) describing the aesthetic of everyday ecologies of “events, doings, and sufferings”(p. 3); and Whitehead (1929/1978) seeing creativity as the endless production of novelty, the action of the world, continuously unfolding. Later, Deleuze (1990/1995) conceptualized creativity as being part of the thinking labor of philosophy, seeing it as creating new concepts and new lines of thinking, as part of a world that is always becoming.

Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality, what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape. (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 106)

Within a relational framing, ecologies are by their nature creative: autopoetic, sympoetic, and fluid. They re-create and re-invent themselves with their own intra-active becoming: different, similar, never quite the same. Ecologies are performative and always open to re-workings, being but fleeting instantiations of the intra-active becoming of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 234, 2010, p. 248, 260). Nothing stays the same.

Creative Ecology as Capacious Methodology

Informed by the postqualitative critiques of qualitative research methodology that urge researchers to go beyond humanist binaries of human-nature, researcher-researched, subject-object and process-product, our creative ecologies of research practice play out the onto-epistemologies of feminist new materialism and posthumanism. This direction is an adding on to qualitative method, a “more-than”—of affective, sensory, emergent, and relational methodologies. It is an ecological way of working in a seemingly unravelling world.

As capacious methodology, our creative ecologies hold the space for stretching boundaries, described by Seigworth (2017) as a reimagining of threshholds: “making-room” for otherness with “attention to the ‘more-than,’ the ‘other-than,’ the ‘different-than,’ its’ attunements to what exceeds and what seeps from the atmospheres and folds of encounters.” (p. 2). Christine Winter (2022) further applies capacious thinking to matters of justice, asking, “What would justice across the human and natural world look like and entail if all beings are subjects?”

In traditional Cartesian paradigm environmental sciences, ecology has been often delineated as the set of interrelationships of a system, with spatial-temporal system boundaries sometimes pragmatically defined: a pond, a rainforest, a desert, and an ant colony. While respecting this pragmatism, posthuman and feminist new material concepts open up ecological spaces to be porous and eclectic, traversing human, more-than-human, matter, affect, and time-space scales. The researcher is completely implicated in the field, as part of their “entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33), with a recognition of all these materialities as vital, vibrant matterings (Bennett, 2010; Khan, 2012). Included in this entanglement are the variety of disciplinary areas explored. Posthuman and feminist new material theorists such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett work their relational, transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary, and speculative way across science, sociology, education, and philosophy. Truman (2019) further outlines the fields of scholarship that contribute to these generous perspectives: for example, feminist science studies, environmental humanities, gender and culture studies, and affect theory.

In this opening up of the territory, ecology can be seen as milieu—from the French “milieu” meaning both the habitat or context you are operating in; and also the middle—which conveys both a temporal sense of “starting where you are, in the middle of things,” and a spatial sense of “open horizons,” described by Harris (2021) as a personal and fluid ecology or milieu of everything, human and more-than-human, tangible and intangible, that exists in or passes through the space that is their life. This generous emergence of ecologies as creative timespaces can perhaps best be seen through the lens of Indigenous understandings of space/place relations, which in an Australian context can be expressed throught concepts of Country:

Country includes humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space. (Country et al., 2016, p. 456)

The fluidity and openness of creative ecology as concept echoes the ideas of those early radical empiricists—John Dewey, William James, and A.N. Whitehead, and later Gilles Deleuze, all of whom had an all-encompassing understanding of the real (including the imagined) and its processual, everchanging nature. Back in 1912, William James expressed this processual fluidity of ecology beautifully when he said:

We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path . . . Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our field of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. (James, 1912/1995, pp. 69–71)

Thinking With Creative Ecologies of Research Practice

Derek McCormack (2008) offers insights on the particular creative ecology of research-practice, in discussing the “thinking-spaces” of research, and the importance of foregrounding the corporeal, affective, and perceptual, with a commitment to Deleuze’s experience and experiment, to animate our creative thinking in those spaces.

McCormack is essentially saying that authentic research-creation is not thinking about stuff in space but thinking in and with stuff in space. It is “a process in which the world participates in the movement of its own becoming” (McCormack, 2008, p. 3). We go out to research the world, but the world is already at work in us.

space-time becomes an ongoing process of heterogeneous, generative creativity without a transcendent creator. And in this vision, the world participates creatively in the folds of which thinking-space consists before individual agency or intentionality gets to work. (McCormack, 2008, p. 3)

In creative ecologies of research practice, we are not reproducing, representing, or reflecting “what is,” so much as, affirmed by Stengers (2005), forging new identities, new connections, and new possibilities. With Frichot (2017), research practices respond “immanently to what is at hand, to the context of practical action” (p. 148). Furthermore, creative ecology as research practice is “a physically embodied process, a mode of information-gathering rooted in and through the body” (Harris, 2021, p. 23). In a world that is unravelling, we need, as researchers, to find ways to respond—responsibly, responsably. We explore thinking with creative ecology as a relational, connective, and inclusive methodology to attend to the world.

Part 2: A Trail of Breadcrumbs: Stories From Our Ecologies of Practice

In which we share something of our research ecologies, thinking within a creative, ecological frame.

Prue—Everyday Encounters of Response-Ability: An Emerging Relational Research Practice

All life forms (including inanimate forms of liveliness) do theory. The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable response-ability.

Karen Barad (2015, p. 2)

How are everyday encounters of relation entangled with the thinking and doing of my research? What does thinking these encounters as creative ecologies do?

Encounter-With-Creek

Walking through the bracken one morning in the bush near my house, I feel a sudden pull to see the creek and change direction. Arriving, I feel the cells in my body release with the sounds, sights, smells and touch of this place: running water, damp earth, the rustle of leaves in the trees, the chatter of small birds, the breeze on my face. These felt pleasures force a pause in my purposeful walk. I become absorbed in watching patterns in the water—the way the water bends and spreads out, how ripples push, overlap, are subsumed into and magnify each other. Patterns of diffraction. I resist the intrusion of time and inevitable delay to the start of my “work” day, instead responding to the urge to take my phone out of my pocket and film these watery gestures. (Prue Adams, research journal 2021)

Could this encounter with the creek be part of the creative ecology of my research practice? My inquiry asks how emergent filmmaking might activate young people’s explorations of experiences of gender in secondary school. While there is no obvious connection, my daily encounters with the liveliness of the bush and its creatures have become entangled with my thinking and writing. These events “show [me] how to look around rather than ahead” (Tsing, 2015, p. 22), to notice shifting assemblages of smell, sound, sight, and texture. The practice of noticing creates relations that destabilize boundaries of self-and-other toward becoming-with in relational encounter. Noticing initiates response, and the “response always takes us somewhere new; we are not quite ourselves any more—or at least the selves we were, but rather ourselves in encounter with another” (Tsing, 2015, p. 46). Something moves between self-and-other that “shifts the shape of the encounter” (Manning, 2020, p. 3). I wonder then where research practice begins and ends. Where do its boundaries lie? Haraway (1988, p. 595) warns that “siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice,” reminding me that boundaries are never neutral or stable. My encounter with the creek on Dharug Ngurra (Dharug Country) in the valley where I live—a settler on stolen lands—produces a visceral experience of emergent relational making with indeterminate boundaries that changes the thinking and doing of the research. With Harris (2021), I think about the constellations of relations that feed and transform my research practice if “every ecology is creative. And every creative ecology is an event, forever changing all of its elements as it co-creates the next moment” (p. 5). And so these encounters with the creek, that shift thinking and doing are as much a part of the creative ecologies of my research as the scholars I think-with and colleagues write-with.

Encounter-With-Writing Group

I experience the writing group as a collision of simultaneous co-presence and separation. Our detached digital rectangles meet on a screen: next to, above, below. Out of sync. Out of time, out of season, out of hemisphere, my day ends as theirs begins. Immersed in the sounds, smells, textures and residues of our individual presents, we mute/unmute and lean in to touch the senses of others. Bodies and spaces, connect-(dis)connect. And in writing-together-apart, almost-nothings touch, materialise and come to matter. Our practice of writing-with opens itself to relation, to the forces that move between human, nonhuman and more than human others. Process is the plan—an understanding that something in intra-action in the event will push us to thought, and then to writing. The experience repeated as distinct events with different configurations and relations becomes a practice that allows me to develop embodied understandings of the process onto-epistemologies I’ve been reading and thinking with in my research. (Extract from creative relational writing-with Andrew Mark Gillott for our co-authored paper, presented online, ICQI 2022).

During COVID isolation, encounters with an online writing group that sprouted from a postqualitative online reading group, became a vital part of my social-intellectual world and research ecology. Our practice of writing-with as relational encounter foregrounds noticing our responses to shared conversation and environment(s), and what this produces. This experience has allowed me to practice thinking and writing-with as dynamic processes of response-ability (Barad, 2007) in which process rather than outcomes are centered. The process is freeing. It shifts writing from burden to pleasure, from fear to curiosity. The creativity of this ecology is not inherent within or possessed by relational elements but is a co-emergent force that moves through an event and becomes in relation-with human, nonhuman and more than human others (Harris, 2021). Creative ecologies are systems of relation and movement, always in process, and always in flux. They dwell in spaces of not-known and not yet in their movement toward new connections and possibilities.

Developing a Practice for Emergent Filmmaking

I take up phematerialist ways of thinking (Renold & Ringrose, 2019) to bring posthuman philosophy, feminisms, and new materialisms into the development of filmmaking workshops as emergent making processes of inquiry. In the workshops, secondary students make with sensory and material qualities of gender-related experiences of school, in playful experimentation to enable iterative responseable making. I put Erin Manning’s (2013) concept of the enabling constraint to work to create conditions for emergence. Enabling constraints “focus multiplicity into emergence” (Manning, 2013, p. 347) by limiting the field of possibility to “activat[e] a passage between creative forces” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 94) in encounter.

In the filmmaking workshops, tuning into affective responses through making is an enabling constraint. First, the students notice their affective responses to short film clips and identify the cinematic techniques filmmakers have used to produce these affects. Then, they are invited to try out these cinematic techniques for affective making. iPads in stabilizer grips for filming and editing become extensions of the students’ bodies that allow them to move fluidly in their making-with the materiality of school spaces and gendered experiences that matter to them. In iterative cycles of filming, editing, and reviewing, the students film, review-feel what is produced and use their responses to guide the next iteration. In encounter, cinematic techniques for affective making with student gender matterings in school spaces and iPads in stabilizer grips could be described as a creative ecology.

A Creative Ecology of Research Practice

To participate consciously in a creative ecology requires openness and epistemic humility, to be present and in relation. Yuwaalaraay writer Nardi Simpson (Simpson & Young, 2022) urges us to walk on and connect meaningfully with the places we work and live in and “the Country will know [. . .] by the way your footsteps change. Your relationship to that place will be something that is good for it as well as good for you.” While I can only ever have a settler relationship with Country, I experience my daily walks in the bush on Dharug Ngurra as bringing me into relation, with the birds, plants, fungi, rocks, soil, and waterways of this place and an awareness of its deep sovereign relation with Dharug people. Practices of noticing (Tsing, 2015) with curiosity (Haraway, 2015) produce care and a becoming-with that disrupts Western human centric, colonizing, and dualist ways of thinking and resonates with phematerialist scholarship. If “nothing makes itself” (Haraway, 2016, p. 58), our generative capacity is always situated in processes of “making-with” or sympoiesis. For Donna Haraway (2016) practices of “making kin” with nonhuman others are an urgent project for reimagining and remaking planetary futures. This ethical dimension of relational becoming is reaffirmed with Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology in which “knowing is not some disembodied idea, but rather, specific material practices of intra-acting with and as part of the world” (Barad et al., 2021, p. 133). In “touching, sensing” and responding, “each of ‘us” is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other’ (Barad, 2015, p. 7). With these ideas, my research practice can be seen as a creative ecology in which understandings emerge and shift through dynamic processes of becoming-with human and nonhuman others, in contexts that range from the everyday to the scholarly, the unexpected to the intentional, the tangible to the intangible, and everything in between.

Jen—Slippery Methodologies for Multispecies Worlds Are Creative Ecologies

The Eel

I don’t mind eels

Except as meals.

And the way they feels.

Ogden Nash (1961)

I’m obsessed with rivers and—for humans—the unloved, uncharismatic creatures that dwell within them, and that is how I slowly seeped into doctoral studies, with a multispecies ethnography on eel worlds. Multispecies ethnography is an umbrella concept that seeks to break through disciplinary barriers and bring “diverse bodies of knowledge into conversation and push them into new directions” (van Dooren et al., 2014, p. 2). This developing transdisciplinary field is in response to this era of cascading ecological crises and academic calls for a different conceptualization of research practices that re-connects humans to the vast webs of life they are entangled in. Environmental humanities scholars call for thick descriptive research that aims to “remedy the alienation from and politicisation, negative framing, and compartmentalization of environmental issues in the Anthropocene” (Neimanis et al., 2015, p. 82). Other scholars ask us to develop the “arts of noticing” while posthuman shifts in research push us to “think with” other creatures of this world, decentring but not obliterating the human (Tsing, 2015, p. 37).

I ponder these provocations through a slippery methodology that acknowledges the elusive nature of knowledge production and is comfortable with situated multiplicity and contestability (Haraway, 1988). Slippery is a nod to the wondrous viscosity of an eel’s skin as well as an acknowledgment of the elusiveness of any methodology that attempts to fully account for a vibrant, material, entangled world/s when it is only us humans doing the accounting.

A Speculative, Sensory River Ecology

This work blends theoretical underpinnings from anthropology and geography with multispecies studies. Multispecies sensory approaches examine sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste in a more-than-human world, moving beyond the human centered purview of traditional sensory ethnography (Fjin & Kavesh, 2021; Pink, 2013). Situating this sensory approach with feminist decolonial scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris and artist Carolina Caycedo’s (Gómez-Barris, 2017) collaboration on a “fisheye epistemology” that dips into the muck of a river, I have been inspired to sensorily think about how it feels to be an eel.

I “know” intellectually through lived experience, conversations, and reading, that eels have lived in the Hawkesbury-Nepean River for generations with many other fish, amphibian, and insect species. “Knowing” in this factual way however is very different from attempting to imagine how eels sensorily exist in their river worlds. While the scientific method is concerned with validity and accurate representation of what is at a point in time, I offer a performative “eely” rendering of this reach of the river. This environmental imaginary—while necessarily speculative although published fish and eel studies ground the work—is a worlding practice that attempts to bring us humans closer to the river and the creatures that dwell in them (Neimanis et al., 2015).

Drawing on the sciences of fish morphology, physiology, biology, and aquatic ecology, I tune into the embodied, material and speculative scales of this ubiquitous slippery creature anguillid australis. Eels process the world around them by employing a complex system of sensory canals in their head and lateral line that act as an information super-highway. Studies have shown that fish can distinguish the difference in these surface waves from insects from surface waves generated by wind, fallen leaves and twigs and that this combination of water displacement and frequency is often supplemented by odor (Mogdans, 2018). Imagining what this must feel like requires a creative process.

This “eel eye episteme” is located along the reach of the Hawkesbury Nepean River from Yarramundi to Shaw’s Creek situated within Yellomundee Regional Park Creek as it nestles at the foot of the Blue Mountains and the Lapstone monocline. This state reserve was formally recognized as an Aboriginal place of significance in 2014 in recognition of the local Aboriginal cultural landscape and traditional territory of the Boorooberongal people of the Darug nationpeople. Shaw’s Creek has been a central meeting place for Aboriginal people from the wider Sydney basin for tens of thousands of years and always is always will be unceded Aboriginal lands.

An Eel Eye Episteme: Yellow Eel

After the long exhausting ocean migration, the wide river with gentle shallows and numerous shoals at Shaw’s Creek called to Yellow Eel. Something—maybe ancestral longing?—deeply resonated in Yellow Eel’s body and told them to stay in these waters for a while. The ambient riverine soundscape here soothed them: the water flow, water depth and light breeze dancing down from the mountain rise melded together for an aquatic orchestra that sounded like “home.” At this place there were no sudden or loud troubling acoustics or droning mechanical vibrations that travelled across the land onto and into the water at irregular times. Yellow Eel always quickly moved away from such sounds in the journey up the river.

The riverbed here was made of cohesive alluvium with a variety of clay, silt, sand, and gravel deposited by a continuous running stream of floodplain water. The shallow depths along these shores suited them too: sloping gradually down to depths with a plethora of choice for daytime cover. They moved into cooler, dappled spaces where native she-oaks draped themselves over the riverbank and underwater tree roots; and where debris clusters made for shelter. They could hear, smell and sense a cacophony of other aquatic bodies in various niches of this waterbody.

Schools of tiny bodies flittered through the very edges of the water, in and out of the macrophytes nibbling on mosquito larvae, plant material and algae (Mosquito fish, Gambusia holbrooki). Hidden in the mud and between river stones were single small fish, Yellow Eel couldn’t see these bodies as they blended perfectly into the floor bed, but they could sense their presence. (Flathead gudgeon, Philypnodon grandiceps). Yellow Eel could especially sense the single, large and dangerous bodies that screamed predator dwelling in the deep pools at the edge of the river (Freshwater mullet, Trachystoma petard and Australian bass, Macquaria novemaculeata).

Yellow Eel found a patch of loose river sand and twisted and turned their lithe, elongated body effectively concealing and protecting themself at the bottom of the river. The native macrophyte ribbonweed, Vallisneria gigantean was rich with micro and macroscopic life forms that supported food for other small fish, amphibians, ducks and turtles. Yellow Eel would ambush creatures moving across their hidden burrow or creep out at night to forage. They would inhale anything—their lack of tearing and slicing teeth meant they engulfed food whole—insects, worms, snails or smaller fish. It was an abundant place and Yellow Eel dwelt well at Shaw’s Creek for many, many turns of the moon growing larger and stronger.

A young elver and yellow eel is nonbinary: I have elected to use they/them pronouns as this speculative imaginary is told from a personal, first being perspective.

Speculative Imaginary Vignettes

This conceptual framing has a natural affinity with creative ecologies of research practice—how could it not!? Eels and their worlds are largely invisible to humans and so I dip into this watery world briefly as a speculative act of imaginative creativity that challenges hegemonic traditional research approaches. As Astrida Neimanis and colleagues write:

imaginaries can guide us to increase our felt responsiveness to environmental bodies not only locally, but in various temporal and spatial modes. (Neimanis et al., 2015, p. 82)

I have tried to sketch a sensory vital vignette of eel worlds and fleeting river entanglements and encounters in my attempts to think with and indeed feel with an “eel” in their invisible worlds. At the risk of anthropomorphising “other” lives, I tentatively offer this reading as a modest step toward orienting relationality and connectivity with/in eel worlds, to think beyond the human and embrace creativity, wonder, novelty, and difference.

Susan—Affective Force of the Everyday: Memories of Lakshmi Ashram

The traveller who had gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it. (Forster, 1908/2012)

What remains in my memory of Lakshmi Ashram? How to describe an ecology of research practice in a small girls school, nestled into a mountainside in Uttarakhand? Do I name things? Do I tell you about the geography, topography and botany: Himalayan “foothills” that are nevertheless 1,900 meters high; patterns of terraced ricefields, stepping down to watery courses that meander along between boulders and river stones along the valley floors? Do I list trees and shrubs that cover the mountainside: baanj (Himalayan oak), burans, (rhododendron) kaphal (bayberry) and chir (Himalayan pine)? Do I speak of the more-than-human inhabitants: the cheeky bandaron (rhesus monkeys), the rather more scary languor (large gray Hanuman monkeys), who send Ruby and Shanti, the two school dogs, into a frenzy of barking from a safe distance; the herd of cows, bells tinkling as they graze their way among the sweet grasses up on a high meadow above the school; and the black bull, tethered, and resentful outside the goshala (cowshed); the occasional leopard, stalking dogs or other small treats, panting its way along the terrace in the small hours?

And what of the human activities: girls and teachers working together, growing garlic, greens, turmeric, tulsi, and other staples; tending the cows; making roti, rice, and daal in the smoky kitchen; sitting in classes; singing; playing a game of tag; or sitting in the sun with a friend, to dry and oil one’s hair. Do I access imaginaries that are no less a part of this ecology: incorporeal spacetime matterings? Past, present, and future entanglements of political, cultural, and social contexts that the school and its inhabitants negotiate, and of the personal and conceptual entanglements that the researcher brings into the ecology.

Spacetime Mattering of Memory and Imagination

Naming all these things enlivens memory/imagination and affect/ion: it does its own work in the time-space dimension of creative ecology. Gatens and Lloyd (1999), explain Spinoza’s conception of imagination and memory as a material and social matter of the interaction of bodies (p. 14). Memory imbricates with imagination, and with present perception, to create our multiple identities. Past, present, and future entangle in what Nordstrom (2013) calls “a Deleuzian space” (p. 252). Barad (2010) provides a quantum material mechanics of this queering of temporality and spatiality with an explanation of spacetimemattering:

Phenomena are not located in space and time; rather, phenomena are material entanglements enfolded and threaded through the spacetimemattering of the universe. . . Memory—the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity—is written into the fabric of the world. The world “holds” the memory of all traces; or rather, the world is its memory (enfolded materialisation). (Barad, 2010, p. 261)

Memory and imagination participate, along with all the other components, as affective bodies in the fluid process of ecology. This is an ecological approach to ethnography: how we are ourselves are produced, sympoetically, in relation with our hosts; in the everyday experience of being/becoming with; and with/in the performativity of our world participating “in the movement of its own becoming” (McCormack, 2008, p. 3). In this creative ecology of research practice, the researcher becomes attuned to the “corporeal, affective and perceptual” (McCormack, 2008, p. 1) of the everyday.

Affective Bodies in a Soft Pink Dusk

Aanya follows me and puts her hand in mine. She’s a relatively new little girl in Class 6. “Where are you going Didi?,” she asks softly. She’s still finding her way in this place. She comes along with me and we climb the stairs to sit on the narrow wooden verandah of Shanti Bhawan (prayer hall). She wants to play a game. She shows me what to do—spread out my fingers on the floor. It’s a counting game, and she does all the work. I just have to choose numbers. As each of my fingers become disqualified in this game, she gently folds them under, so I end up with only one finger extended. It’s a tender and simple game with a little girl in the soft pink dusk. (Germein, 2022, p. 182)

Thinking through memories of affective experience, in this case, the haecceity of little-girl-counting-game-gentle-fingers-quiet-pink-dusk, I can see how affect exists over time and space as a kind of temporally and spatially plastic virtual nervous system, enacting the queer perturbations and infinite connectedness of the quantum field. Affect is constructed in an instant and can linger or evaporate; it can connect (or disconnect) bodies across a room or across continents (Germein, 2022, p. 183). The work of affective bodies, of all kinds, is integral to the mechanics of how my creative ecology of research practice functions.

My research practice is a creative matter of experience and experiment, rather than data discovery and reproduction. At Lakshmi Ashram, I very quickly come to experience the ecology “less as a site ‘out there’ at which research takes place, but a space of distributed agency, action, and encounter within which research materials are not so much discovered as co-generated” (McCormack, 2008, p. 5). This letting go of a Cartesian relation is a relief. Research becomes a matter of responding immanently to what is at hand (Frichot, 2017): a rhizomatic excursion. Rajchman (2000) similarly notes that for Deleuze and Guattari, coming to know becomes an empirical, bodily, affective, and intellectual process, always in process. Learning is not an organized and predetermined procedure, a “well-planned itinerary; on the contrary, one is taken on a sort of conceptual trip for which there preexists no map” (p. 22).

The visiting researcher’s responsibility is like that of visitors anywhere: to be polite and curious (Haraway, 2016), with a “virtue of letting those one visits intra-actively shape what occurs” (Haraway, 2015, p. 5). One needs to accept what is given by a community, giving up on the will to know (Bhattacharya, 2019). A creative ecology of research practice occurs with the awareness that we all, severally and singly are being remade in this ongoing performance of the everyday.

A Matter of Ethics and Cultural Justice

This postqualitative and intercultural research practice is an ethical inhabitation, a decision to be for a community and a choice to be “committed, cathected and sustaining” (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022, p. 522). As such it’s an “unfinished and unfinishable project” (Jeanes, 2006, p. 131). The memory and imagination of this Himalayan ecology lives on in the researcher, as bodily affect, always becoming. An ecological approach to research thus provides an ethical, generous, and ongoing approach to cultural justice, becoming with otherness and trusting the inherent intelligence of affect as its organizing principle. It also enables or indeed demands the connectedness and commitment that live on and on, as does affect.

Part 3: Weaving Our Thinking Together: Learning From Our Ecologies of Practice

As we began this article, we asked the questions: “What does inhabiting creative ecologies as concept do?” “What does thinking with/in creative ecologies mean for our research work?”

What Work Does Inhabiting Creative Ecologies as Concept Do?

Creative ecology as concept emerges out of a long tradition of relational and process ontologies, expressed in in contemporary times as a largely Global North academic discourse, as feminist poststructuralism moving toward posthumanism and feminist new materialism. It is however well-anticipated by the ancient connected and relational onto-epistemologies of Indigenous cultures, and in other traditional philosophies underpinning Global South ways of knowing/being. Immersion in these re/new/ed paradigms has enabled a relinquishing of Cartesian remnants: researcher as separate from the field, documenting, analyzing, and representing seemingly inert data. A creative ecological approach acknowledges the autopoetic instincts of ecologies, living life in a forward trajectory. Within our research ecologies of practice, intimately connected with/in the “field,” we have been able to embrace the responsibility and response-ability of being and becoming in those fields.

Inhabiting creative ecologies disrupts binaries—not just researcher-researched boundaries, but also the oppositions we create between concepts, theories—and data. As Truman (2019) points out, thinking with concepts and data together, as vital materialities, is valid empirical research. Creative ecology as research practice also dismantles the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge, expanding the research territory toward inter and transdisciplinary knowledge. We are challenged to develop literacies across several disciplinary and methodological fields. Jen’s research traverses biology, eel ecology, river systems, family history, and multispecies justice. Prue’s research engages with filmmaking, affective intensities, gender equity, education policy, and serendipidous everyday encounters. Susan draws on ethnography, culture and interculturality, language, history, affect theory . . . This is demanding but enticing nomadic work, complex but not complicated.

Research practice within creative ecologies creates a different positioning for the researcher: a connected and ethical inhabitation, with the understanding and experience of themselves inside the event of research, affected and affecting and with the commitment that this repositioning implies. Finally, practicing research with/in creative ecology as we have characterized it, subverts neoliberal concepts of creativity as instrumental to innovation, commodification, and productivism.

Thinking with/in creative ecologies also does work on a bigger stage: the urgent global concerns of the climate crisis, ecological sustainability, and empathic socio-cultures. An expansive ecological lens enables researchers and other humans to better understand the genesis and trajectory of current and emergent problems (given that James’ wave-crest-crashing-forwards is accelerating its trajectory), and to develop connected and committed responses.

What Does Thinking With/In Creative Ecologies Mean for Our Research Work?

Permission to Play

Creativity! Ecology! Permission (as if we needed it) to step away from “researcher as separate from the field.” Permission to disrupt and queer humanist qualitative methodologies and methods. Permission to be curious, to experiment (St. Pierre et al., 2016). Permission to think creatively and speculatively. Permission to stay close to the data (because we are after all data and we like to be close to our selves). Permission to privilege (unfolding) data over methods and research questions (Arlander, 2017). Permission to include the personal, the relational, the immanent, and the slippery. Permission to play and triangulate with the eclectic concepts that imbricate with ecological perspectives: agential realism, assemblages, entanglements, haecceities, Deleuze’s “nomadic empiricism” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 226), or his “thousand tiny methodologies” (Lather, 2013, p. 635). We give each other and ourselves, permission.

New Possibilities for Researcher Identity

Thinking with/in creative ecologies collapses the researcher-researched binary. Not completely, because the researcher, as visitor in the field, has responsibility for the self-awareness of at least doing no harm. A specific re/construction of ourselves emerges directly out of working with ecological, more-than-human, feminist materialities. This is our commitment as ethical humans, in the imbricated ethico-onto-epistemologies of our research places. We hold ourselves to account for our responsibility and response-ability, invited into host communities of Indian school girls, eels and fisherfolk, and Australian senior college students.

There’s a relief in moving beyond the colonialism implicit in “collecting” other people’s, or other critter’s data. There’s a relief in relinquishing power-laden positions of researcher, knower, arbiter, evaluator. There’s a relief in surrendering to the force of affective bodies. Even though we know our work will be judged through its creatures (Whitehead, 1929/1978), we can engage in that representational process contingently, seeing representation as just one element of an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and as a performative extension of the research process (Barad, 2003), never resolving or complete (Bennett, 2010).

Released from all these constraints, we re-imagine our researcherly selves as creative and experimental, as curious and polite visitors in someone else’s country, as insider-outsiders, as flowing within the affective force of bodies.

Creating Kinship

Kinship as creative practitioners links us up as researchers. We work in very different creative ecologies but our conceptual kinship nourishes our research practice. We have become our own creative ecology, thinking, writing, editing from wherever we are, across Australia, India, Europe. Our own spacetimemattering. This is not the connectedness of researchers who have everything in common but the gritty creativity of difference, inhabiting Deleuze’s striated space (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Together-apart, we see-hear-feel-think in relation with our conversations, readings, writings, and shared events that have become inextricably and imperceptibly enmeshed in our research practices.

Conclusion

This article shares something of the substance of our individual research, providing an entré to our research ecologies. We think with Norman Denzin’s (2017) “method of instances,” in providing momentary resonances of this place at that time; and acknowledging the ongoing and dynamic becoming of the world. Perhaps the affect of these resonances lives on for readers, in thinking, “Oh yes, so this is what it means to be in that little school in the Himalay, on that riverbank with these fisher folk, in that writing group, walking through that bush landscape.” And perhaps the reader carries this resonance forward into their own ecological trajectories.

Having shared something of the intimacies of our creative ecologies of research practice, we have also explored what work creative ecology as concept does—to methodology, to research, to us as researchers, and to shared understandings of urgent planetary matters. The sticky concepts we take forward are those of relationality and connectedness: vital matterings for our un/raveling planetary future.