Listening for the Crow’s Reply: Poetic Transcription,Emotionality,and More-Than-Human Relations

Abstract

This article examines how poetic transcription can illuminate human–more-than-human relationality by foregrounding emotionality. Poetic transcription draws attention to the sensuous terrain—wind, insects, birds, and other more-than-human presences—that shapes research encounters but is often rendered invisible. Attending to these presences disrupts anthropocentric assumptions and deepens response-ability, the ethical obligation to attend to multiple others with whom we share our lives. Drawing on interview data from an urban farm, I show how poetic transcription surfaces ecological emotions while highlighting uneven conditions in which these emotions emerge. Poetic transcription offers a tool for rethinking relationality and emotionality through context-specific human–more-than-human entanglements.

This article examines how poetic transcription can bring human–more-than-human relationality into view through close attention to emotionality. Drawing on Esther Ohito and Tiffany Nyachae’s (2019) call for poetics to open possibilities for “[de- and re-] constructing understandings,” I explore how poetic forms help illuminate the felt, situated textures of relational life (as cited in Leggo, 2004, p. 30). Poetic transcription, that is, composing poem-like pieces from participants’ own words, has enabled research to surface the sensory, affective, and interpretive dimensions of interview data. Here, I extend this practice by incorporating the more-than-human world into the transcription process itself. My aim is to show how poetics can draw attention to our capacity to respond ethically and attentively to the multiple others with whom we share our lives, what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability, and to demonstrate how poetic transcription, when reimagined in this way, can evoke the emotional contours of human–more-than-human relations.

I understand the more-than-human world as the “sensuous terrain” which surrounds us and continually shapes our lives (Abram, 1996). When we overlook these interactions, David Abram argues, we risk reinforcing anthropocentrism and obscuring the ways human subjectivity is co-constituted with more-than-human forces. Attending to these entanglements, or intra-actions, helps cultivate a deeper awareness of interconnection and, importantly, of the uneven ways we are positioned to act with care. Here, I draw on Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action to understand these entanglements not as interactions between separate entities but as the process through which human and more-than-human co-emerge. This focus on mutual constitution provides a theoretical grounding for how poetic transcription can make these co-creative processes visible. As Haraway (2016) reminds us, “we are not all response-able in the same ways. The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives” (p. 29). By adapting human-centred practices of interviewing and transcription to include more-than-human presence and influence, poetic transcription offers a method for foregrounding these relations and for expressing their emotional and ethical dimensions. The following sections describe the research inquiry in which this approach was employed, outline how this method builds on and diverges from existing practices, and provide two examples that illustrate how poetic transcription can support a relational analysis of emotionality in human–more-than-human encounters.

Background

Emerging from a research project titled Feeling Climate Change: Experiences of Ecological Emotions on Urban Farms, this inquiry was situated on a nonprofit urban farm in a predominantly Black, immigrant, and economically marginalized community with a high concentration of youth and younger people in Toronto, Canada. The research explores how the interconnection between humans and more-than-humans shapes ecological emotions and how material forces influence these experiences. Throughout this article, I use affect and emotionality together to signal the fluid movement between named feelings, such as grief or frustration, and the atmospheric, embodied intensities that exceed language. Following Sarah Ahmed’s (2010) insistence that emotions “stick” to bodies and objects, I treat affect and emotion as intertwined processes rather than sharply distinct categories. Ecological emotions, like all emotions, are dynamic and often ambivalent. They include, but are not limited to, environmental grief (Kevorkian, 2004), eco guilt and eco shame (Bruhn, 2018; Mallet, 2012), ecological anxiety (Pihkala, 2020; Ray, 2020), environmental melancholia (Lertzman, 2015), ecological grief (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017), eco rage (Westervelt, 2019), and solistagia, a term describing negative emotional responses to ecological change (Albrecht, 2019, 2020; Bogard, 2023). While anyone may experience ecological emotions, they are often intensified for people in marginalized communities disproportionately affected by climate change, including racialized people (Burton, 2020), disabled people (Kosanic et al., 2019), and youth (Galway & Field, 2023), as well as for those with a heightened awareness of the crisis, such as climate activists and scientists (Duggan et al., 2021) and farmers (Ellis, 2016).

The ongoing urgency of climate change frequently elicits emotional reactions in which experiences of grief are central (Comtesse et al., 2021; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). Ecological grief refers to “grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses” (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018, p. 275). Grief, a constellation of emotions ranging from anger and rage to anxiety and fear (Rosenblatt, 1996), is often suppressed, individualized, and medicalized in North America. This is reflected in the recent inclusion of prolonged grief disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR) and the neoliberal imperative of happiness and its equation with health (Ahmed, 2010; Davies, 2016; Hill et al., 2019). By attending to the affective and emotional dimensions of ecological experience, this research highlights both the intensity of these experiences and the ways in which societal norms shape their expression.

This inquiry is informed by crip theory and critical posthumanism, which together provide a lens for understanding emotionality and human–nonhuman relationality. When combined, these frameworks form a crip posthumanist perspective that illuminates how normative expectations of feeling and functioning shape ecological emotions, reveals the uneven burdens carried by marginalized communities, and recentres the more-than-human as an active participant in emotional life (Collins, 2024). “Crip,” reclaimed by activists, artists, and scholars, signifies the transformative “disruption” (Reid, 2016) brought about by disability, challenging the normalized standards of “humanness” (McRuer, 2006). Crip exposes how societal norms perpetuate beliefs about health, productivity, and humanity, often marginalizing those whose abilities deviate from socially accepted norms (Rauscher & McClintock, 1997). As such, the crip seeks to reconstruct the world by questioning entrenched social constructions of normalcy (Shanouda, 2019). Critical posthumanism similarly challenges anthropocentrism and the assumptions that the “human” conforms to a narrow, male, Eurocentric, nondisabled standard (Braidotti, 2013). Crip posthumanism thus critiques the notion of humans as the apex of a species hierarchy and asks us to decentre the human while attending to the emotional and embodied responses that arise in our intra-actions with the more-than-human-world (Collins, forthcoming).

Making emotions and affect visible allows for an examination of how certain values are assigned value over time (Schmitz & Ahmed, 2014), and how power is enacted on and through bodies (Nash, 2019). Engaging with Brady Forrest’s (2020) concept of “affect trouble,” the pressure to feel in socially prescribed ways reveals expectations around what bodyminds are supposed to do, be, or feel. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (2002) gender trouble and Robert McRuer’ s (2010) ability trouble, Forrest (2020) characterizes affect trouble as the ongoing, unattainable demand to experience and express emotions in socially approved ways. This framework helps explain how emotional responses to both human and more-than-human losses are regulated, medicalized (Granek, 2017), pathologized (Lund, 2021), and/or disenfranchised (Doka, 1999), reinforcing anthropocentrism while marginalizing those whose emotional and sensory expressions fall outside of normative expectations (Rauscher & McClintock, 1997).

Employing critical posthuman ethnography (Collins, 2023), this research used a variety of methods including participant observation, photographs, audio-recorded soundscapes, field notes, and semi-structured in-depth interviews (n = 12). Interviews were transcribed, including “ums,” “ahs,” pauses, and other background sounds. Transcripts were then reviewed and corrected for errors arising from contextual gaps, drawing from field notes and photographs. The transcription process also recorded intra-actions with the sensuous terrain, some of which were apparent through human speech during the interviews. For example, during one interview, a squirrel rustling in the tree above us knocked several crab apples, one of which fell on the interviewee. In the transcripts, “wind rustling leaves” became “squirrel rustling crab apple tree leaves,” and “slight metal tapping” became “fingers drumming on metal greenhouse bench.” In this approach, transcription is understood as an interpretative practice that shapes what becomes perceptible as data. Attending to the sensuous terrain required an analytic orientation that remained open to the presence and influence of more-than-humans within the research encounter.

It was through this careful review of the transcripts that the interplay between the sensuous terrain of the more-than-human and human emotionality became vividly present. Rather than treating more-than-human sounds as background noise, they were engaged as analytically significant elements that shaped the affective and relational dynamic of the interview. In this sense, more-than-human presences are simultaneously data, context, and participants, co-constituting the conditions through which emotionality emerges and is interpreted. This approach extends conventional transcription practices by foregrounding the intra-active processes through which meaning is produced, aligning with a crip posthumanist commitment to decentring the human while attending to uneven relations of power, embodiment, and response-ability.

Poetic Transcription

Poetic transcription, a process often ascribed to Corrine Glesne (1997), involves “the creation of poem-like compositions from the words of interviewees” for which there is no prescribed set of rules (p. 202). Poetics has been taken up across multiple scholarly traditions, including poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2017; Prendergast, 2009), critical poetic inquiry (Davis, 2021; Hockett & Walter, 2025), and arts-based research (Leavy, 2015), as well as Black feminist approaches that mobilize poetic form to interrogate power, language, and knowledge production (Judd, 2023; Ohito & Nyachae, 2019). Within poetic inquiry, poetry has been understood as a mode that can reflect on, play against, and perform research (Canniford, 2012; Prendergast, 2006), extending beyond representation to generate sensuous, affective, and reflexive engagements with data. Across these traditions, poetics is not only a form of expression but also a way of knowing that engages cognitive, sensory, and affective dimensions of experience (Haberlin, 2017; Richardson, 1994).

Poetic inquiry has often been used to foreground voice, emotion, and participants’ experiences within qualitative research, treating poetic form as a way of representing human meaning-making. In this article, I build on these traditions by engaging poetics as a method, analytic practice, and epistemological orientation. Poetic transcription thus operates as both representation and analysis, rendering emotional and relational textures perceptible while participating in their interpretation through the selection, arrangement, and erasure of language. I conceptualize poetics as a way of knowing grounded in attunement to rhythm, absence, and sensuous detail, through which relational and affective knowledge is produced beyond the limits of conventional qualitative prose. Extending poetic inquiry beyond human-centred accounts, this article foregrounds more-than-human relationality and treats poetics as an intra-active mode of inquiry that participates in the production of relational knowledge. Building on this framing, the article makes three key methodological contributions. First, it expands poetic transcription by treating more-than-human sounds and presences as integral components of the transcript, thereby extending what counts as data. Second, it mobilizes poetic transcription as an explicitly analytic practice, where processes such as erasure, arrangement, and attention to sound generate interpretive insight. Third, it situates poetic transcription within a crip posthumanist framework, foregrounding how emotionality and relationality emerge through human–more-than-human intra-actions.

This method is a specific form of found poetry, where the “found” material is exclusively qualitative data. Since the formative work of Glesne (1997), there have been numerous examples of poetic transcription as a method (Calafell, 2004; Canniford, 2012; Chuang, 2018; Cosantino, 2021, 2022; Gasson et al., 2015; Sanders & Lamm, 2022) as well as instructions for how to engage the method (Illingworth, 2022; Romero, 2020), evaluate it (Reale, 2014), and “twist” it (Smart, 2014; Smart & Loads, 2017). This foundational technique has also given rise to distinct methods like poetic juxtaposition, a broader approach that places these data alongside theoretical and popular texts (Thomas, 2021). Importantly, poetic forms of thinking and writing can disrupt traditional ways of knowing by employing metaphors, rhythm, sound, and spatial arrangements to create vivid sensory experiences and convey deeper significance (Leavy, 2015). Through this sensuous engagement, poetics can reveal what has been obscured while also foregrounding the relational and affective dimensions of qualitative data. As Sanders and Lamm (2022) suggest, poetic thinking moves beyond purely representational modes of analysis, instead engaging the entanglements between researcher, participants, and world as part of the analytic process itself. In this way, poetic transcription operates as an analytic practice that generates new insights through its form. Or as Neil McBride (2009) writes, poetics “questions, it leaves frayed edges and loose wires. It draws out the hidden, the spiritual, the underlying rhythms of life that we swamp with information, noise and news channels” (n.p.). It can also lay bare affective entanglements through highlighting instances within the data that evoked an embodied visceral reaction from the researcher (Fitzpatrick & Bell, 2016; Sanders & Lamm, 2022). As a result, poetics can engage our emotional selves (Prendergast et al., 2009) and demand critical interpretation (Faulkner, 2017). In sum, poetics is a “felt experience; the experience of being in the whirlpool of sensuous flow that we are as experiencing beings” (Freeman, 2016, p. 72).

While listening to the recorded interview audio and reviewing the transcripts, it became clear that the sensuous more-than-human world was vitally present, not only through the verbalized human content of the interview but also through the buzzing of insects, the sound of the wind, the rustling of squirrels, and the chirping and cawing of birds. Vitality, ¹ the immeasurable, nonhierarchical, and agentic potential of all life forms (Collins et al., 2022), can be understood as the flow of affect and sensations that shape human–more-than-human intra-action. The process of reading for emotionality through the vitality of the sensuous world highlighted which elements became more noticeable and which remained in the background of the interview transcripts and recordings. For example, transcripts can, perhaps unintentionally, be stripped of contextualizing information, which can silence the sensuous terrain. However, including sounds from the more-than-human terrain in transcription removes the risk of inadvertently silencing the contextual materiality from interviews and interpretive transcriptions, thus muting the sensory landscape. As Mary Bucholtz (2000) and Susan Tilley (2003) suggest, transcription is a dual process of interpretation and representation, involving decisions about what is included and how it is rendered. Extending this view, Harding (2023) similarly argues that transcripts must be understood as active and agentic documents, what she terms “more-than-transcripts,” that do not simply capture human talk but materialize the relational and affective forces that shape the encounter. Bringing this perspective into conversation with Barad’s (2007) notion of the performative “cut” highlights how transcribing more-than-human sounds and sensations is itself a world-making practice, attuning the researcher to the sensuous terrain rather than filtering it out as contextual noise.

With this in mind, I began poetically playing with the transcripts to highlight emotionality and the sensuous terrain by following the work of Jackie Wiggins (2011) and nancy viva davis halifax (2017). Each of these scholar-artists employs found and erasure poetry, working with existing texts by selecting, removing, or obscuring language to create new compositions. For example, halifax (2017) uses the technique of erasure to highlight the incomplete accountability of the government of Ontario and the continued erasure of people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the 2013 government apology to survivors of the Huronia Regional Centre. Wiggins (2011) employed this technique to disguise identifying details of interviewees and ultimately found that this process of removal was “a process of analysis that enabled me to better understand and express what the participants had shared” (p. 6). Both examples foreground emotional experiences. As Laurel Richardson (1994) found, interview-based poetry can sharpen and “evoke emotional responses” without moving away from the interview transcripts and accountability (p. 9). And importantly, as Richardson (2001) notes, poetry is felt (p. 880). This use of erasure or redaction to evoke felt responses is one way of highlighting how human–more-than-human relationality is understood as both felt and necessary, particularly in ways that resist and challenge normative and socially sanctioned ways of feeling.

However, unlike Wiggins (2011) and halifax (2017), I do not identify as an artist or poet. And I am mindful of the critiques of arts-based research conducted by nonartists as “art-like” or “not-quite-art” rather than art (Barone, 2001; Piirto, 2002; Prendergast, 2009). Instead, following Glesne (1997), I describe this process of playing with selective and partial erasure in interview transcriptions as “poetic transcription” as it “moves in the direction of poetry but is not necessarily poetry” (p. 213). She continues,

Poetic transcription approximates poetry through the concentrated language of interviewee, shaped by researcher to give pleasure and truth. But the truth may be a ‘small t’ truth of description, re-presenting a perspective or experience of the interviewee, filtered through the researcher. (p. 213)

It is important here to note that participants were not involved in the editing or final formation of the poetic pieces. This methodological choice was made consciously and was guided by a core ethical commitment to just research practices. While participants were fairly compensated for their time and expertise during the interviews, the research budget did not include funds for the additional labour that poetic co-creation would entail. To ask participants to engage in this creative and analytical work without appropriate compensation would be to extract their intellectual and emotional labour, reproducing the very exploitative dynamics this research seeks to critique. Therefore, the poetic transcription is presented here explicitly as a product of my analytical engagement with the data, not as a co-authored artefact. My effort to ensure accountability and transparency lies not in the co-creation of the poems but in the methodological choice to keep all original words visible and in the critical framing that surrounds the analysis.

Moreover, as a white settler researcher, I am continually learning about the politics, pitfalls, and implications of research, particularly the effects of foregrounding or backgrounding interviewee texts, as it can potentially alter the original meaning conveyed. This is especially critical when considering the perspectives of marginalized communities, who have historically been harmed by research processes due to white supremacy and settler colonialism. In my effort to “stay with the trouble” of these tensions, I have chosen to keep all the text visible, albeit in italics, to transparently reflect my methodological choices. By doing so, I aim to position these examples of poetic transcription as collective meaning-making, involving the intra-action of the creative presence of the researcher (Eakin & Gladstone, 2020), the human interviewee, the more-than-human world, and the emotionality that emerged through this confluence. Using poetics as meaning-making is an attempt to follow the direction of Knowles and Cole (2008), who describe how artistic formats have the possibility to engage diverse publics in an “accessible, evocative, embodied, [and] empathic” way (Knowles & Cole, 2008, p. 6, 8).

While poetic transcription has been widely used to foreground voice, emotions, and participants’ experiences within qualitative research, it has largely remained oriented towards human-centred accounts of meaning-making. This article seeks to extend poetic transcription by incorporating the sensuous terrain of the research encounter—environmental sounds, atmospheres, and more-the-humans’ presences—into both transcription and analysis. In doing so, poetic transcription becomes not only a representational practice but also a crip posthuman analytic method that attends to how emotionality emerges through human and more-than-human intra-actions. By bringing soundscape and environmental presence into the analytic frame, this approach reconfigures transcription as a site of relational knowledge production, expanding the methodological possibilities of poetic inquiry in qualitative research.

Situated Frustration

Thinking with the above discussion about poetic transcription and the creative response emerging from and with these data, I began to experiment with selective and partial erasure in the interview transcripts. Taking excerpts from transcripts, I initially altered the text colour of selected words from black to greyscale to create a sense of negative space that highlights the remaining text and invites the reader to fill in the gaps with their imagination, emotions, and experiences. However, in response to accessibility concerns, I revised this formatting by replacing greyscale text with italicized text in a reduced font size to signal words that have been de-emphasized through poetic erasure, while the remaining poetic text is presented in bold and increased font size to foreground the analytic selection. This formatting functions conceptually as a visual and spatial articulation of erasure and emphasis, making visible the interpretive decisions involved in poetic transcription while inviting readers to attend to both what is present and what recedes, thereby engaging the relational and affective dimensions of the analysis. What is emphasized is a visual representation of what is often invisibilized—more-than-human relationality and ecological emotions related to climate change. Below is an example of playing with poetics in transcription text. The question preceding this excerpt was “Do you think that your personal experiences or your background impact how you feel about climate change?”

Excerpt from interview:

I don’t know—um, so, like, as a Black person I feel like when [crow companion caw] things such as natural disasters happen and they affect people who aren’t white, [crow companion caw] I feel like it’s not really cared about the same way as if white people [insects buzzing] were impacted. [bird call] Like, for example, the hurricane in, like, the, um—like I just keep hearing Florida, Florida, Florida. Like, what about, like, all those countries in the Caribbean? So, it’s like—you know? [bird chirping] So, I think that, like from that aspect, um—from, like, from that aspect, I don’t feel like that’s a personal experience. I guess it is a personal experience because I’m Black. I think a lot of people who are non-white may feel that way. [bird song] So, I think it’s kind of frustrating knowing that. . . . I was honestly thinking that and it’s probably, that’s probably it. I feel like if white [plane passing overhead], if, like, predominantly, like, white countries [bird chirping] were facing the brunt of climate change [squirrel rustling leaves in crab apple tree], I think there would be a lot more action [cars honking] [wind rustling] Okay, what I think will probably happen is, [bird trilling] like, when, like, whiter countries—I don’t know what the proper terminology is, but, like, when whiter countries are constantly being faced with those things [squirrel rustling leaves in branches of crab apple tree]—maybe, like, Europe, for example, because, like, there’s a bunch of countries in Europe—I feel like maybe then change will start to happen because, yeah. [insects buzzing] I don’t think many white governments, [bird song] um, really care about racialized people. [birds calling to each other] So I think that will probably be the thing to do it. And then [human voices in the distance], what I would want to happen, I feel like, is kind of obvious, is, like [wind rustling leaves], change, like systemic change to happen, like, right now because it’s needed right now [leaves rustling in the wind]. So, yeah. I’m not entirely sure. I feel like it’s very frustrating, like constantly being [wind rustling through leaves]—maybe not told but shown that, like, your life doesn’t really matter or, like, people that look like you, like—I don’t want to say, like, the majority, because the majority of the people aren’t white, but—so I don’t know how to phrase that. Um [crow companion caw], I, just constantly being told—well, not told, but shown—that, like, people, like, you don’t matter, or, like, you don’t care [crow companion caw]. But, like, when things happen to people that look white [crow companion caw].

Later in the interview, I queried the continued use of the word “frustrating” when what is being described might be labelled with stronger emotions like anger, rage, or even grief. The interviewee discussed this use of language as a way of avoiding “that stereotype of [the] angry Black woman.” While the interviewee is describing the lack of care for racialized Caribbean nations in the face of climate change-related storms and disasters, it is possible to link this feeling to affect trouble, in that this lack of care might not be personalized, as the laying bare of some emotions, like anger, is simply not permissible in a White supremacist society.

Here, crip posthumanism provides a crucial lens for interpreting this “affect trouble” as a form of compulsory able-bodiedness and normative emotional performance. Robert McRuer’s (2006) concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness” describes a system wherein able-bodiedness is presumed, and disability is seen as an undesirable state that must be overcome. This logic extends beyond the physical body to regulate how bodies are supposed to feel and behave in public. The interviewee’s self-policing of her frustration to avoid the “angry Black woman” trope is a clear enactment of this pressure. The socially “disabling” emotion, anger, is suppressed in favour of a more “acceptable” state of frustration. This act of cripping the emotional response, that is by making visible the normative constraints that demand this suppression, reveals how the interviewee navigates a world that pathologizes her legitimate emotional response to systemic injustice. The frustration she expresses is not just a feeling; it is a strategic and constrained mode of being in a world that deems her full emotional expression non-normative and therefore “disordered.”

The interviewee describes the movement between grief and frustration as one that emerges from “knowing that . . . nobody else cares.” Employing poetic transcription highlights the interviewees’ felt experience of frustration and disillusionment with the way white governments prioritize communities in the global north in their response to disasters and climate change, as the racialized nations and communities bearing the brunt of climate change are all but ignored. The concept of grief supremacy, as described by Jennifer Poole and Carmen Galvan (2021), helps contextualize this experience. Grief supremacy refers to prioritizing white loss and grief while diminishing the significance of the grief experienced by racialized communities. Here, poetic transcription, in the words of Neil McBride (2009), brings to the fore “the hidden” and “the underlying rhythms” of grief as entangled with colonialism and white supremacy.

Moreover, the playing with poetics in the text offers space to engage with human–more-than-human interconnection. For example, the interplay between the companion call of the crow and the verbal speech of the interviewee at the end of the excerpt highlights this interconnection. Crow companion calls are noncontextual call-and-response caws where the crow is listening for a response. In this case, the response never arrives. Similarly, the interviewee notes the continued lack of response from governments of predominantly white countries in the global north. This lack of a response could be understood as a poignant moment in which the shared experience of being coded in relation to a corporeal standard of humanness, both for Black peoples and more-than-humans, is made visible.

It is important to underscore the long-standing humanist hierarchies, deeply intertwined with “scientific” racism, that have inflicted harm on racialized individuals, particularly Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, and disabled people of colour, who have historically been regarded as less than human and compared to animals (Linett, 2023; Luciano & Chen, 2019; Taylor, 2017). Highlighting the shared experience of being categorized according to a normative standard of humanness is not without risks. It can unintentionally revert to eugenic logics under which Blackness and Indigeneity have been equated with animality. This article aims to “stay with the trouble” of acknowledging the harm caused by eugenic logics and “scientific” racism while seeking to disrupt anthropocentrism—the “anchor of speciesism, capitalism, and settler colonialism” (Belcourt, 2020, p. 21)—by emphasizing the shared experiences of human–more-than-human relationality.

Rejecting Hope

Below is another example of playing with absences through poetic transcription. The question preceding this excerpt was, “Does the topic of climate change come up for you with friends, family, community, or here at the farm?”

Excerpt from interview:

[An orchestra of crickets loudly chirping] Um, yeah. I, I think it does come up. I’m always hesitant to bring it up, though, because I just feel like I don’t want to expose people to the level of hopelessness that I feel. [traffic rumbling in distance] And so–I don’t want to be this big downer. And so, I don’t. And I also don’t enjoy getting into emotional arguments about it, per se, although I’ve done my fair share of it. But it never makes me feel that great. So, yeah, generally I try to kind of just never share my full feelings on the matter. Just kind of, um, yeah. . . . [car loudly revving engine]. . . . [Orchestra of crickets continuing to chirp in background] Because you just end up— there’s so, there’s so much and there’s so much emotion tied into the way that you view these huge issues because it’s about how we’re living our lives, you know. [traffic rumbling] Like there’s like a moral ethical dilemma in there so, people can be very defensive about, you know–they don’t want to, or I think they don’t want to confront, you know, how we’re all, you know, complicit in this thing. . . . [Orchestra of crickets softly chirping] Right, yeah. Yeah, I guess I don’t feel any, like, real [birdsong]—I almost just kind of like, ignore them, maybe, or I just, I just I can’t. I can’t. I feel like I can’t be convinced that there is hope [laughs] at this point. But I am reluctant to, like, take that hope from other people, so I don’t really, don’t really get [traffic sounds] too angry about it or anything, [plane overhead] right. Yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess there are a lot of people who criticize the environmental movement for being alarmist or, or what have you, but I don’t know. [Orchestra of crickets softly chirping] I, I mean, you can’t help it if it’s alarming. I mean, [laughs] what are you going to do? It’s, it just seems to me like it is alarming, so. I’m sorry, but. It can be nothing—but we can be nothing but alarmist if the news is alarming. [truck brakes squealing and traffic rumbling].

This description of hopelessness and pressure to not “expose people to the level of hopelessness” and “not share my true feelings” is reflective of Forrest’s (2020) “affect trouble” and pressure to feel in socially sanctioned ways. This was made even more pronounced as during the generation of observational data, this interviewee had been described as “depressed” by a long-term acquaintance, particularly after the release of the most recent InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, but was described by the same person as “much happier” now. The interviewee later discussed the process of losing hope as connected to their belief that uncontrolled collapse was inevitable. For them, it was this realization that spurred them towards urban agriculture as a way to prepare for this anticipated future. The unsettled feelings brought up by anticipated collapse can be difficult in that they can “disrupt the sense of security—comfort, control, complacency—that global histories of imperialism have afforded” those who benefit from those systems (Verlie, 2021, p. 7). And for this interviewee, feelings of anticipated collapse foreclosed the future they once envisioned. This refusal of hopeful affect that can be understood through crip posthumanism as a challenge to normative futurity, which is often anchored in able-bodied ideals of progress, productivity, and linear advancement.

To contextualize ecological emotions, it is crucial to consider embodied differences to avoid falling into the trap of “existential exceptionalism,” wherein climate change is presented as the predominant existential threat while disregarding histories of oppression (Heglar, 2020). Moreover, the brunt of climate change and its consequences are disproportionately felt by marginalized and vulnerable groups who often have fewer resources to cope with its effects. Through this lens, social location and identity are vital to navigating the differential impacts of environmental degradation. Importantly, while other participants described their social locations in the interviews and chose to complete a voluntary demographic survey, this participant chose to do neither. Viewing the option to “opt out” through the lens of crip posthumanism leads to a necessary querying of what is assumed when differences are elided and what is meant by “we’re all complicit.” Assuming that we are all complicit, including more-than-humans like the crickets, discounts the differentiated impacts and defaults, perhaps unintentionally, to anthropocentrism. As Kathryn Yusoff (2018) notes, these differences are vital as the white and “rational” human has long been “ending worlds” through settler colonial violences but is only now experiencing the impacts of these crises (p. xiii).

Social location and identity impact conceptualizations of the future. Theorizing in and around dystopian (and progressive) understandings of futurity positions those outside of the norm as “out of time.” As Carla Rice and her colleagues (2017) note, centring normative Western notions of time and life course progress also alters conceptualizations of futurity. Thinking with queer theory, Lee Edelman (2004) calls for a refusal of the future (and hopefulness for the future), gesturing to the ways in which the concept of the future has been used to regulate and control. As Edelman (2004) writes, “to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation . . . is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (p. 4). In other words, hope is inherently tied to the affirmation of the status quo, and by refusing to embrace hope, we can open new possibilities for thinking and acting outside of the constraints of the current social order. This failure to embrace hope described by the interviewee can be understood as a critique of social norms (Halberstam, 2011). However, the refusal to conform to expectations of hopefulness and a discounting of the future has been critiqued by both José Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Alison Kafer (2013) for its inattention to how social location impacts who can (and cannot) take up an antisocial position. In other words, futurity and the privilege of rejecting the future are unevenly distributed. It is particularly poignant that during this interview, when discussing the emotion that is tangled up in “how we’re living our lives,” the noise of traffic takes centre stage. Indeed, the interplay between the sound of traffic—brakes squealing, cars revving—alongside an orchestra of crickets amid hopelessness highlights the humanistic division of nature and culture, which has led to progress (for a few) and collapse (for the rest).

Conclusion

According to climate activist and humourist Andrew Boyd (2023), the way we narrate climate change matters as it informs our responsibilities to and for those changes as well as the agency with which we are response-able to others. In other words, the way we story climate change shapes our sense of relationality and our capacity to act. Poetic transcription is one method of storying the impacts of climate change, which highlights the interconnection with the more-than-human world in ways that lay bare emotionality and the importance of accounting for social location. By foregrounding the sounds of the sensuous terrain, this method enacts Barad’s (2007) principle of intra-action demonstrating how meaning and feeling are not produced by humans alone but emerge through our entanglement with the more-than-human world. Employing poetics is one way that the human-centred method of interviewing and transcribing can open new possibilities for exploring and re-evaluating perceptions and interpretations of the connections between emotionality and relationality to attend to the feelings these explorations engender. Poetic transcription offers possibilities for rethinking relationality, wherein response-ability emerges as context-specific entanglements in which the felt experience of such intra-actions is made visible. This article offers a crip posthuman reconfiguration of poetic transcription that treats more-than-human sensuous presence as both data and analytic and positions poetics as a method for thinking with emotionality rather than simply representing it. In this way, poetic transcription is not only a method of representation but also a mode of inquiry that produces relational and affective knowledge, reconfiguring how qualitative research can attend to emotionality within more-than-human worlds.