Thinking with edges – and at the edges: some retrospective reflections on fieldwork and missed connections

Abstract

This Note is a creative piece of writing that flows freely and weaves together different thoughts and memories. The initial idea for it stemmed from my reflections about disability and my relationship with edges. Disability, however, is only one part of it – and a relatively small part. In the Note, I think with edges and my response to edges, in different situations and contexts, and about the relationship between edges and missed connections in my previous qualitative research on war and armed conflict. Throughout, I accentuate entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds.

Introduction

According to Haraway (2016: 35), ‘It matters what thoughts think thoughts’. This Note is a creative and interdisciplinary piece of writing that goes where it wants to, meandering like a river. I intentionally allow my thoughts to flow freely, taking me to different places, familiar and unfamiliar. Although the initial idea for it stemmed from my reflections, as a (relatively new) wheelchair user, about my own positionality, what I am primarily doing is reflecting, in a way that feels deeply liberating, on some of my previous qualitative research relating to war and armed conflict (while also making reference to my current research). If, as Haraway (2018: 103) underlines, thinking, like becoming, is always a process of thinking with, I am used to thinking with rich qualitative data. In this Note, however, I am doing something different. I am thinking with edges, and about my personal responses to different edges. I am also questioning edges and writing in a way that has no edges, to mirror and accentuate fundamental connections and entanglements – which too much of my own research has, until recently, neglected – between human and more-than-human worlds.

At the edges

It was a Saturday afternoon around lunchtime. The shopping centre, as always, was crowded. Swirling and zigzagging bodies moved in all directions and at different speeds. Noise, lights, and music. My hand on the joystick, I advanced at a pace that would allow me to stop sharply if I needed to. I suddenly became very aware of my position. I was at the edges. Edges are now my preferred position in busy areas. I feel somehow safer there. I am less likely to get pushed and shoved. And I can see more from the edges. When I am in the middle, I see more bodies than faces. From the edges, I have a wider purview.

I think about Ries and Sisk's (2010: 1636) argument that ‘attempts to label species according to a particular directional edge response are fundamentally flawed because no species should be expected to show the same response at all edge types’. I too have different responses at different edges. The train pulled into the station. All the passengers disembarked. I sat looking out of the door, joystick in one hand and suitcase in the other, watching people dash past. There was no sign of the yellow access ramp. A man boarded to collect rubbish. ‘Don’t worry, love. The train isn’t going anywhere for another half an hour’. Despite his reassuring words, I felt slightly anxious. I was unwillingly on the edge, somewhere between arrival and non-arrival. My own ‘time-space of arrival’ – a term that Schwanen (2006: 884) uses to refer to ‘a time-span appropriate for arrival at a certain physical location’ – was different from that of my fellow passengers. After several minutes, the yellow ramp came into view. I found myself on a largely empty platform.

Porous edges

A man recently shouted out ‘bionic woman’ when he saw me. I think I rolled my eyes at him. The word ‘bionic’ makes me think of Haraway's (2004: 455) cyborg, which she defines as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’. According to her, we are all cyborgs. I prefer Gilbert et al.'s (2012: 336) argument that ‘We are all lichens’. Like the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae, we are different and intertwined species living together – and sharing experiences.

My current research is exploring some of the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war. One interviewee, ¹ a herpetologist, explained that when Russian aggressors destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 (see Vyshnevskyi et al., 2023), large numbers of Danube newts – an endangered species – died after being washed into the salty waters of the Black Sea (Marushchak et al., 2024: 124). Some newts, however, survived, drifting on debris and washing up on the shore in Odesa where local people collected them and took them to a zoo. When the area by the Dnipro River became safer, the interviewee and her colleagues from the Ukrainian Herpetological Society collected the newts and returned them to their natural range. During the process of releasing them, she recalled, ‘we experienced shelling from the Russian side’. As she spoke, I imagined emotions of fear trans-corporeally surging through and across these entangled bodies, human and other-than-human (Alaimo, 2008).

My body and powerchair (‘Betty’) are entangled. When the chair suddenly cuts out for no obvious reason, a feeling of panic cuts in. This has never happened before; wheels that are no longer turning. For a few seconds, I am spatially stuck. I think of another wheel that doesn’t turn. A wheel that is stuck in time. I think of the rusting yellow Ferris wheel – ‘a symbol of disrupted childhood’ (Bogachenko and Oleinikova, 2024: 604) – in Pripyat, an abandoned city close to Chernobyl in northern Ukraine. The wheel stopped turning in April 1986, after reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Approximately 155,000 square kilometres of territory in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were contaminated (United Nations [UN], 2024).

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area around the plant – spanning 30 km and known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) – ‘is essentially uninhabited’ (IAEA, n.d.). This is misleading. Other-than-human forms of life are flourishing in the CEZ, including wolves, lynx, deer and bison. It has become ‘an iconic – if accidental – experiment in rewilding’ (United Nations Environment Agency [UNEP], 2020). The concept of an exclusion zone itself denotes edges. I think of Ned Balbo's beautiful and evocative poem ‘The wolves of Chernobyl’. The first stanza reads:

At twenty below, the wolves forsake the forest's

infinite birches, padding over snow.

Habitable human settlements

cling to the zone's edge, snowbound. (Balbo, 2023: 57)

The zone's edge is a demarcation between human and more-than-human worlds, but this demarcation can never be complete. In her sociography of the CEZ, Freeman (2022: 780) writes that ‘The wolves come from a space marked as uninhabitable, a space meant to be bounded, but they are felt to be breathing at the door of the liveable’. The edges are necessarily soft and permeable. Porous. They are confluences of storylines, of interconnected lives playing out in parallel.

They [the wolves] scavenge in the dark.

Villagers at the zones edge scavenge, too. (Balbo, 2023: 57)

False edges

It was bitterly cold. Slow lay on the ground. I was thankful for the small electric fire. It was winter 2015. January or February. I was in Potočari in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. From the window, I could see the Potočari Memorial Centre, where many of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, in July 1995, are buried. Some of the victims are still missing. I sat chatting to one of the ‘Mothers of Srebrenica’ in her small shop. I had met this woman previously. She was always friendly and welcoming. I vividly remember a stray dog roaming around outside, looking for food. It was brown, skinny and held one of its paws off the ground. I went back the following day with a tin of dog food. The dog was wary and kept its distance. It ravenously ate the food once I went back inside the shop. I went back the next day and did the same thing. The next day I left, to go back to where I was living at the time (in Tuzla).

Ten years on, I still think about the dog from time to time. I still cry. I still wonder what happened to it. Pierce and Bekoff (2021: 7) believe that ‘dogs would survive and even thrive in a post-human world’. This dog was not in a post-human world but it was very much alone, on the edges of a human world still recovering from a brutal war. Few had time to think or care about it. It was just another stray. Maybe it had once belonged to someone who had died or could no longer afford to look after it. I hope that it too somehow found a way to survive and even thrive, like its canid relatives in the CEZ. A poignant line from the penultimate stanza of Balbo's (2023: 57) aforementioned poem; ‘Today, the wolves reclaim the land, and thrive’.

Probably I will always remember this dog, but as much as I try, I can’t remember its face. In his work on stray dogs in Iraq, Leep (2018: 60) argues that ‘In the dog's gaze, we might feel a pull towards belongingness, an affective encountering and dwelling together in each other's presence’. Perhaps this explains why the ‘dog's gaze’ is completely absent from my memory of it. I have never written about this dog until now. It was peripheral to my research. Very much on the edge of it. My research was full of edges. During the many years that I undertook qualitative fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I was only interested in human experiences and stories. I interviewed women and men who had lost loved ones during the Bosnian war, been expelled from their homes, been detained in brutal camps, experienced physical and sexual violence. But war, to reiterate, does not only affect humans. As my new research on the Russia–Ukraine war is analysing, it also affects animals, rivers, soil, forests – what anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2015: 5) calls ‘earth-beings’. Can we comprehensively study war and armed conflict, therefore, in ways that preserve false edges between human and more-than-human worlds and neglect how violence affects these earth-beings themselves? Edges are soft and porous. ‘We are all lichens’ (Gilbert et al., 2012: 336).

Sound edges

When travelling in Bosnia-Herzegovina (and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia), I have always been attentive to landscapes. The changing hue of hills and mountains depending on the position of the sun and the time of day. Fields full of suncokreti (sunflowers), sometimes with their heavy heads drooping in the summer sunshine. Dramatic karst landscapes in Herzegovina. Physical reminders of the war – skeletal structures of former homes; memorials reflecting ongoing ethnic divides and polarised war narratives; signs close to former front lines warning of landmines. In contrast, I recall very few soundscapes, ‘the auditory equivalent’ of landscapes (Atkinson, 2011: 12). When I think about sounds, I overwhelmingly recall human-generated sounds – what the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause (2015: 12) refers to as the anthropophony. I particularly remember the cacophony of multiple car horns honking on Saturday afternoons on their way to a wedding; the sound of imams calling Muslims to prayer; Dua Lipa's song ‘Be the One’ seemingly playing in every café I went to.

Aside from the sound of dogs barking at night when I was trying to sleep, I struggle to recall other-than-human biological sounds – which Krause (2015: 12) terms the biophony. I also have trouble remembering natural sounds that are non-biological in origin, which Krause (2015: 11) refers to as the geophony. The main exception to this is my memory of the dramatic sounds of thunder one stormy afternoon in Sarajevo in the summer of 2019. I have never heard thunder so loud. It was as if the towering Olympic mountains of Bjelašnica, Igman, Jahorina and Trebević were quarrelling and slamming into each other.

Listening skills are crucial in qualitative research. Lavee and Itzchakov (2023: 623) underline in this regard that ‘Listening resembles a muscle that needs to be activated’. They further emphasise that post-interview reflections on listening – for example, by listening to the recordings of interviews – are an important way of training this muscle (Lavee and Itzchakov, 2023: 623). While many of my own reflections on listening are admittedly somewhat tardy, coming several years after my last period of fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I now realise that my listening ‘muscle’ was not fully activated. Certainly, I listened carefully and attentively to what interviewees were telling me, but to what extent was I truly an ‘earwitness’ to what was happening around me (Schafer, 1993: 151)?

I recently read through some old post-interview notes from a period of fieldwork in Ahmići, a name that will be forever synonymous with one of the most heinous war crimes committed during the Bosnian war. On 16 April 1993, members of the Croatian Defence Forces launched an attack on the village that killed 116 civilians (UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, 2024). Twenty-six years later, I was working on a book chapter about Ahmići and resilience (Clark, 2021). I was exploring how people in the village – many of whom lost loved ones in the attack – have dealt with the legacy of what happened and what resources they have drawn on as they rebuild their lives. Significantly, resilience is never just about people. It develops through the interactions between individuals and their social ecologies, meaning everything that they have around them (families, communities, land, institutions and so on) (Ungar, 2012). Yet just as I repeatedly overlooked other-than-human victims of the attack on the village – including dogs and cows – I paid only limited attention to what was happening around me aurally.

Only one set of post-interview notes explicitly refers to sound. The sentence reads simply: ‘The couple live near the lower mosque and other than the sound of some children playing close by, the village was incredibly quiet’. I missed crucial acoustic dimensions of people's social ecologies. How does sound affect healing? How does it shape resilience? By not using all of my senses, I also missed valuable opportunities to really get to ‘know’ Ahmići and the many other places, rural and urban, that I visited in Bosnia-Herzegovina over the years (Kimmerer, 2016: 44) – and to create my own rich ‘sound souvenirs’ (Tonkiss, 2020: 245).

While we cannot close our ears in the same way that we can close our eyes, Atkinson (2011: 13–14) argues that ‘ears have walls, or, alternatively, the human body is a listening presence that both actively and unconsciously experiences sound within “walled” territories’. My own ears for too long had thick ‘walls’. In prioritising human stories and experiences, I focused on listening to human voices (and human-generated sounds). Through this approach, I unintentionally – and indeed unwittingly – created edges. Edges from which certain sounds slid and dropped off my radar; false edges that preserved false human/nature binaries. I am reminded of one of my favourite passages from Kimmerer's (2013: 300) book Braiding Sweetgrass; ‘Listening … creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop’.

There are now many sound-related questions that I want to explore. What do ‘post-conflict’ societies, societies transitioning from war to ‘peace’, sound like? What are their ‘soundmarks’ (Schafer, 1993: 36)? How do these differ from pre-war soundmarks? What do more-than-human worlds affected by war and armed conflict reveal about themselves through sound? What do areas devoid of human presence, areas of rewilding, sound like? What stories do these sounds tell? Ultimately, how do we listen holistically, in ways that are inclusive of human and more-than-human worlds? How do we listen deeply, without walls and without edges? How can we advance toward rewilding our own ears (Pinto, 2017)?

My current research on the Russia–Ukraine war is addressing some of these questions. I ask interviewees to make two short soundscape recordings using their mobile phones, which they upload onto a secure website. The recordings – which are discussed during the interviews and which I have developed into an online soundscape exhibition ² – offer a different way of thinking about the impact of war on more-than-human worlds. The inclusion in my research methodology of this soundscape component is also intended to encourage people to really listen. Krause (2013: 236) sums it up beautifully; ‘The whisper of every leaf and creature implores us to love and care for the fragile tapestry of the biophony’.

Edge effects – and contact zones

Ecologists frequently write about edges and edge effects which are linked, in turn, to habitat fragmentation. Human-induced fragmentation – such as the construction of a road through woodland – leads to the creation of edges between habitats. Ecological edges, thus, are ‘boundaries or transition zones between two adjacent landscape patches or land cover types’ (Porensky and Young, 2013: 510). Edge effects refer to the changes, biotic or abiotic, occurring within and near these edges, such as changes in moisture levels or in species composition (Fischer and Lindenmayer, 2007: 271). De la Sancha et al. (2023: 350), for example, note that ‘Forest edges are well-known to differ from forest interior in microclimate, biotic composition and ecological function’. Although edge effects can be positive in some cases, more commonly they are associated, inter alia, with loss of biodiversity (Harrison and Banks-Leite, 2020) and increased predation (Kaasiku, Rannap and Männil, 2022).

There is fragmentation in qualitative research. We work with fragments of people's stories and lives, with what they are willing and able to share with us. Archival documents ‘are full of fragments and discontinuities’ (Tamboukou, 2014: 619). The fieldnotes that we make, however detailed, are ‘parts of an infinite whole that we could never fully comprehend, but which we can partially grasp in moments when fragments fall together when connections are made’ (Flora and Andersen, 2019: 555). We look for ways to piece the fragments together, to make connections between them and, in so doing, to tell a bigger story. The edges may be seamless or they may be more prominent and untidy. What is happening at these edges, as sites where ‘a multitude of story-lines intersect’ (Veland and Lynch, 2017: 9)? Can we create positive edge effects when we bring different edges together in new ways, including the edges of different thoughts, memories and experiences, allowing them to fuse and come together as they want to?

My wheelchair bumps along. I hurry towards the sound that is pulling me in, away from the edges. A deep and resonating roar. Several more roars follow and some chuffing. Then I see him, lying on his side in the warm sunshine, his mane thick and resplendent. His body heaves up and down with each roar. After a few minutes, he goes back to sleep. His daughter is nearby, pacing up and down. The crowd is silent, as if mesmerised.

My mind juxtaposes this memory with another image, of a scene from several thousand miles away. A starving lion is pacing in a cage. Another lion lies on the ground close by, crumpled and emaciated, its entire spine protruding sharply. It is skin and bone (Elbagir, 2024). These lions are in Sudan, just two of the victims of an ongoing war, their suffering entangled with countless human and more-than-human lives. They are a further reminder of how everything is interconnected. The image elicits emotions that remind me of Haraway's (2018: 102) powerful words: ‘Stories and storytelling risk contact zones with diverse situated thinking, feeling, and narrating’. Qualitative research necessarily involves contact zones.

I hold the joystick in my right hand and re-think my positionality at the edges. As a qualitative researcher, I cannot remain at the edges. Edges of what? By thinking with edges, I have ultimately brought together and accentuated important cross-world contact zones, reflecting on where they might take us qualitatively when we open ourselves – and our ears – to freely exploring them.