19. Ethnography
Paper
Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness Through Multispecies Storytelling - Co-living and Conflicts in a Zoo
Verneri Valasmo1, Varpu Mehto1, Riikka Hohti1,2
1University of Helsinki, Finland; 2University of Oulu, Finland
Presenting Author: Valasmo, Verneri;
Mehto, Varpu
This presentation is based on multispecies ethnographic research conducted in a Finnish zoo with the aim of looking at education as more-than-human practice (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden et al. 2013; Rautio et al. 2021). The overall educational aim in the research is to cultivate “arts of attentiveness” (van Dooren et al., 2016) towards multispecies co-existence in all its complexity. We ask and experiment with the question: how to take other than human species as protagonists of the stories in their own right? Focusing especially on encounters and assemblages involving human children and barnacle geese, we ask: how does a multispecies approach based on open-ended assemblages work as a critical educational approach, and what could multispecies stories teach us about educational practices?
Our approach is prompted by discussions around the so-called Anthropocene (e.g. Latour 2017) that have stressed the interdependencies of humans, other species, and materialities (Godfray et al., 2018). This discussion insists on reconsideration of anthropocentric epistemologies in current educational practices and research methodologies (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020).
For this study, of specific interest is a policy adopted by the zoo which aims to further co-living of humans and barnacle geese in the zoo area. During spring time and early summer the zoo is a popular place for groups of school kids to visit. Simultaneously it is home to the population of wild barnacle geese, which nest there every year. The shared history of human and barnacle geese in Finland is a relatively short one, and not without conflicts. Barnacle geese are “newcomers” as nesting birds in Finland, and the population has increased rapidly during the last decades (Yrjölä et al., 2017). The fast growing presence of these birds have brought out irritation, economical concerns, political dispute, fear of bacteria and viruses and even hatred.
The short and problematic history of the cohabitation of humans and barnacle geese in Finland calls for attentiveness towards complexities and imagination to find new ways of co-living and becoming-with in consequential relationships with others (Van Dooren et al. 2016).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedMultispecies ethnography (Ogden, et al. 2013) enables us to foreground all kinds of creatures that according to Kirksey & Helmreich (2010) have traditionally appeared mostly in the margins of ethnography, as part of the landscape, as food for humans or as symbols.
We use the concept of assemblage (Tsing 2015), as a tool to stay open to the complex, messy, ever changing and surprising entanglements. By focusing on open-ended gatherings, we examine how species are brought into being through relations (van Dooren et al. 2016). Our approach requires us to avoid unnecessary simplifications, universalisations, or sugar coating of the relations of children and barnacle geese (Hohti & Tammi, 2021). We consider the zoo, located on an island near a shoreline of the busy city, as a vibrant more-than-human assemblage (Tsing, 2015). As much as it is a zoo governed by humans, it is a home island for nesting birds and other critters. The concept of assemblages helps us see the co-existence of these multiple realities and emerging tensions and frictions.
We use the emerging approach of multispecies storytelling (Hohti & Tammi, forthcoming; Bencke & Bruhn, 2022) to write small stories on educational practices with barnacle geese as our protagonist. We rely on thinkers such as Haraway (2015), who describes good stories as big enough to involve complexities, but still left open at the edges so that they remain greedy for potentially surprising connections. These stories are composed with layered and mismatched practices of knowing and being (Tsing, 2015). Despret (2022, 6) encourages us to aim for “-- explanations which end up multiplying worlds and celebrating the emergence of an infinite number of modes of existence”.
Rhythms of migrating barnacle goose population affect the timing of our ethnographic practice. We start during the beginning of nesting season. Next, collaborating closely with the zoo’s staff and an environmental educator, we participate in guided excursions of groups visiting from schools, and a daytime camp for children. At the time of these educational practices, goslings are leaving their nests with their protecting parents around. During our time in the zoo, we discuss with children and staff, record audio landscapes and videos, and take photographs. To expand our research practice from verbal and visual modes of thinking, we also devote time for slowness and sensing with other senses (Hohti & Tammi, forthcoming).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe ontoepistemological starting points of multispecies ethnography do not allow producing outcomes that would reduce reality into hierarchical categories, or universal epistemic claims. By situating stories on barnacle geese and humans we aim to discuss substantial questions of the Anthropocene, while simultaneously avoiding abstraction (van Dooren 2019). Through multispecies storytelling, we present some findings but moreover, we appreciate the internal inconsistencies, potential thread ends for new questions, and openings for new connections.
We claim that the concept of assemblages can be employed as a critical approach in that it allows us to discuss ethico-political questions on the constitution of multispecies communities and the terms and procedures of co-living (van Dooren, 2019). Even though our study begins with free birds nesting in the island, the Zoo is rich with contradictions: for example, it simultaneously presents animals as entertainment for people and as means of education, and works on conservation of endangered species. Therefore, we weave critical threads into the stories, considering for example, how histories of violence entangle with the current practices taking place in the zoo (Hohti & Tammi, forthcoming).
Van Dooren and colleagues (2016) describe the arts of attentiveness as the ability of both paying attention to others and crafting a meaningful response (van Dooren et al., 2016). Our study shows how the ability to notice other species can be elaborated towards this broader aim in both education and ethnographic research methodology. Despret (2022) points out that we should also acknowledge how other species, in our case barnacle geese, are attentive themselves (Despret 2022).
ReferencesBencke, I. & Bruhn, J. (eds.) (2022). Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices. Punctum books.
Common Worlds Research Collective. (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374032
Despret, V. (2022). Living as a bird. Polity Press.
Godfray, H., Charles J., Paul Aveyard, Tara Garnett, Jim W. Hall, Timothy j. Key, Jaime Lorimer,... & Susan A. Jebb (2018). Meat consumption, health, and the environment. Science, 361(6399), eaam5324.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press.
Hohti, R. & Tammi, T. (forthcoming). Composting storytelling: an approach for critical multispecies ethnography and worlding.
Kirksey, S.E., & Helmreich, S. (2010) The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 25(4), 545–576.
Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight lectures on the new climate regime. Polity Press.
Ogden, L. A., Hall, B., & Tanita, K. (2013). Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography. Environment and society, 4(1), 5–24.
Rautio, P., Tammi, T., & Hohti, R. (2021). Children after the Animal Turn: Child–Animal Relations and Multispecies Scholarship. The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods, 341.
Tsing Lowenhaupt, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world : on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
van Dooren, T. (2019). The Wake of Crows. Living and dying in the shared worlds. Columbia University Press.
van Dooren, T., Kirksey, E., & Münster, U. (2016). Multispecies Studies. Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness. Environmental Humanities, 8(1), 1–23.
Yrjölä, R. A., Holopainen, S., Pakarinen, R., Tuoriniemi, S., Luostarinen, M., Mikkola-Roos, M., Nummi, P., & Väänänen, V.-M. (2017). The Barnacle Goose (Branta leucopsis) in the archipelago of southern Finland - population growth and nesting dispersal. Ornis Fennica, 94(4), 161–171
19. Ethnography
Paper
Superposition and Entanglement. What Happens When a Phenomenon is Observed?
Bosse Bergstedt
Østfold University College, Norway
Presenting Author: Bergstedt, Bosse
Within ethnography and several other methods, questions often arise regarding observation. In this paper, I will discuss the research question What happens when a phenomenon is observed? and highlight two concepts in quantum physics (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022).
Superposition means that a particle is in many places at the same time. The particle can move by choosing all paths between two points simultaneously and information can travel over great distances without taking any time at all. Entanglement means that two particles have properties that they get from being connected by being either opposite or equal. When the particles are separated, they will still be entangled and have superposition (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022).
Superposition and entanglement mean that it is not possible to describe a particle without simultaneously describing that it is part of a context with the other. They form a whole and cannot of course be in and of themselves, if the state of one changes, the other does the same (Bohr 2013, Nørretranders 2022). This is something that goes on until the particles are measured or observed. Then the particle must profess existence by choosing a state and becoming a position of either 0 or 1. This contributes to going from superposition to position and creating a duality between subject and object. But in the meantime, and before they are observed, the particles are in many states at the same time, a superposition (Nørretranders 2022).
What does this mean for a research process, is it possible to do research without turning phenomena into objects? One possibility is to use the body as a research instrument. The body has superposition and comes into being through entanglement as long as it does not make other phenomena into objects. Researching with the senses of the body makes it possible to be touched by the affects (Massumi 2002) of what is created when phenomena are in superposition and entanglement, which in turn can lead to descriptions that strive to convey the genesis of the phenomena without turning them into objects. Using examples from educational research, this paper describes how this can be used as multisensory methods with a perspective that we call haptic sensorium (Bergstedt 2021a, 2021b) which will assist in creating our understanding of the relationship between body and matter and how our bodies are transcorporeal and always more than just human (Alaimo 2012, William 2021).
Theoretically, the paper is in close connection with research in posthumanism and new materialism, and our ambitions have been to create new knowledge in the fields of ethnology and post-qualitative methods (Barad 2007, S:t Pierre 2013, Juleskjær 2020, Bergstedt 2021b). Research that can give us new knowledge of how bodies and matter connect and have an ethical implication for awareness of the responsibility and care in human-nature relations.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe concepts of "superposition" and "entanglement", are used in quantum physics to describe the creation of particles (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022) to understand how phenomena are created. Developing a new method in post-qualitative methods this knowledge helps us to work with the body as a research instrument and have developed the perspective of a haptic sensorium. This method focused on the researcher's body and especially senses and affects. This makes it possible to come into contact with and be created together with the diversity and complexity that characterizes both one’s own body and other phenomena. For the researcher, it is essential to follow and to become with what arises together with the phenomenon. Using examples from educational research, this paper describes how this can be used as multisensory methods, which will assist in creating our understanding of the relationship between body and matter and how our bodies are transcorporeal and always more than just human (Alaimo 2012, William 2021).To do that it is good to start in the middle of a phenomenon, from here it is possible to follow a phenom without making it into an object. (Delueuze, Guattari 2015). A part of the process is also to have attention to special situations or events that it is possible to describe as a situation and movement that is in motion (Barad 2007).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsWhat is specific about this paper is that it connects current research in quantum physics (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022) with methodology in Posthumanism and New materialism (S:t Pierre 2013, Juleskjær 2020). The outcomes of this connection give us new knowledge of how bodies and matter can connect without creat the other as an object and how this can be an imported part of empirical post-quantitative research. Researching with the senses of the body makes it possible to be touched by the affects (Massumi 2002) of what is created when phenomena are in superposition and entanglement, which in turn can lead to descriptions that strive to convey the genesis of the phenomena without turning them into objects. Research that can give us new knowledge of how bodies and matter connect and have an ethical implication for awareness of the responsibility and care in human-nature relations.
ReferencesAlaimo, Stacy, (2012). States of suspension: Trans-corporeality at sea. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476-493. Alaimo 2008
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bergstedt, Bosse (2021a) "The Ontology of Becoming: To Research and Become with the World", Education sciences, 2021 Vol.11(9), p.491.
Bergstedt, Bosse (2021b) "Thinking with the world – to explore the becoming of phenomena", Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, Vol12, No 2.
Bergstedt, Bosse (2022) Tingens oskuldsfulla hemlighet. Oskuldens museum, Istanbul, Nordisk Museologi, Vol 4 No 2, s 97-108.
Bohr, Niels (2013) Filosofiska skrifter: Bind I–III, Aarhus: Forlaget Philosophia.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (2015) Tusen platåer. Hägersten: Tankekraft.
Grosz, Elisabeth, (2018) The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism, New York: Colombia University Press.
Haraway, Donna, (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Durham/London: Duke University Press
Juelskjær, Malou (2019) At tænke med Karen Barads agnetiala realisme, København: Samfundslittertur.
Juelskjær, Malou, (2020) “Mattering Pedagogy in Precarious Times of (Un)learning” Matter, Journal of New Materialist Research, 52-79.
Juelskjær, Malou, Plauborg, Helle & Adrian, Stine Willum (2020b) Dialogues on agential realism: engaging in worldings through research practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
Nørretrander, Tor (2022) Det udelelige. Niels Bohrs aktualitet i fysik, mystik og politik, København: Gyldendal.
St. Pierre, Elizabeth (2013). The post continue: becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (Special Issue “Post-Qualitative Research”, P. Lather & E. St. Pierre [Eds.]), 26(6).
Zeilinger, Anton (2010) Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation Hardcover. New York.
Williams James W (2021) Listening Skills Training: How to Truly Listen, Understand, and Validate for Better and Deeper Connections, Independently Published.
19. Ethnography
Paper
Unsettled and Uncertain: White Educators Engagement with Difficult Knowledge.
Esther Fitzpatrick
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Presenting Author: Fitzpatrick, Esther
Increasingly in education we require our teachers and educators to implement culturally responsive learning experiences for a range of culturally and ethnically diverse students. For many this involves engaging with “difficult knowledge”. This paper argues that for educators to engage productively in culturally responsive pedagogies an engagement with difficult knowledge, through acknowledgement of the history and contemporary racial and ethnic practices, both implicit and explicit, needs to be addressed. Britzman (2013) talks about “difficult knowledge” in relation to disrupting ignorance of racial and ethnic stereotyping and bias. The concept of being “privileged” is difficult for many whites to comprehend, claiming ignorance and resistance. Garrett and Segall (2013) critique the belief that ignorance is simply a “lack of knowledge” (p. 295) and resistance an active not doing what is asked of (297). They redefine ignorance as a strategy of avoidance, which they link to psychoanalytic theories of “unconscious knowing” and “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 2013). Garrett and Segall argue that whites have raced ways of knowing through living in a raced society and further, this knowledge is uninterrogated white racial knowledge. Ignorance, redefined as a dynamic of knowledge, is a matter of choice, it is an active ‘forgetting’, a refusal of information and a desire not to know (Fitzpatrick 2018; Bell & Ream, 2021). For culturally responsive pedagogies to engage with an aim for social justice through decoloniality, strategies of ignorance employed to avoid acknowledging the privileges inherited through colonial histories need to be disrupted. Although difficult, these fraught colonial histories and positionalities of privilege need to be remembered and critically interrogated, and ways for educators and students to engage productively in difficult conversations need to be explored and realised.
To articulate the phenomenon of white educator paralysis (Leonardo, 2015) this paper draws on the complexity of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2015). Critically engaging with and interrogating theories and pedagogies of positionality, Postcoloniality, ‘working-the-hypen’ and decoloniality, it reimagines the place of critical reflexivity in teacher training and educators practice. Critical reflexivity requires a move to contextualise positionality in an experience, and recognise the interplay between power, privilege and bias within our own lives and practices (Fitzpatrick 2018). Decolonisation work is both difficult and contested (Fūnez-Flores, Beltrán and Jupp 2022). Significant to the role of an educator is recognition that white racial groups often have difficult histories and critically interrogating these histories works as a form of decolonisation through making colonial structures visible, in being truthful, in unsettling the dominant narratives, resisting hegemonic discourses, and providing context to difficult conversations to address material change (Fitzpatrick, 2018). Coming to know the past, the telling of alternative histories and alternative knowledges are all part of the critical pedagogy of decolonisation (Smith 1999). The possibility also of indigenising education, where Hoskins and Jones (2022) argue, indigenous ways of being and knowing are normalised, “offer[ing] a better, more just, society” (3). This paper argues practices such as culturally responsive pedagogy require a critically reflexive approach to ensure a perpetuation of binary categories don’t persist, and instead the possibility of new and emerging identities are able to flourish. Critically reflexive practices drawn on, to imagine differently and further the work of culturally responsive pedagogies are the methodologies of Critical Autoethnography and Critical Family History.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo engage in the discussion on difficult knowledge I will draw on critically reflexive projects: Critical Autoethnography and Critical Family History (Fitzpatrick, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023). The context will be white settler identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Critical autoethnography (CAE), a qualitative methodology, focuses on the lived experiences of an individual, or individuals, inquiring into relevant issues they encounter, such as in their community of practice. The individual’s story is central and is juxtaposed alongside other stories from the wider community, and critical factors that influence these experiences. CAE appreciates the complexity of lived experiences, the different knowledges, cultures, and values that exist in our communities, and the embodied and felt repercussions of an experience (Adams et al., 2014). It recognises lived experiences are messy, entangled with others, have history, are haunted, are subject to time and place, and are influenced by external events. CAE requires the researcher to engage with theory through a critical framework of analysis (Holman Jones, 2015).
Likewise, Critical Family History (CFH) involves the process of layering the personal story alongside the wider historical and social story, and alongside stories of other peoples who are entangled in our becoming (Sleeter 2016). Cognisant of Smith’s influential work on decolonising methodologies, CFH illuminates the power dynamics embedded in family histories and requires the researcher to speak with the ghosts (Derrida,1994).
CAE and CFH focus the researcher on the critical, to orient them towards doing research that can potentially transform and bring justice. The researcher writes small personal stories with theory/theorists relevant to the context who, St. Pierre (2014) contended, are in “sympathy” with our writing. This ongoing conversation between writing and theory is a cyclic process of generating data while simultaneously reading literature and thinking with theory. Holman Jones (2015) argued “the insights of theory … only become useful to us when they are presented in context, in practice, and performance, in people’s lives” (p. 5). They demand that the researcher think otherwise. The generation of stories, is ongoing and dances between generating and analysing data, through deliberate writing and crafting of stories with theory (Holman Jones, 2015). The researcher is required to develop a robust understanding of theories they draw on to engage in deep analytical work through the writing of the narratives, attending to the craft of writing as a method of inquiry (Fitzpatrick & Mullen, 2019). The act of doing, although difficult, is also rewarding.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsCAE has relevance to the communities we engage in. It interrogates issues that are intrinsically embedded in the professions and lives of the people we work with. It works with data gleaned from our own experiences. It enables us to engage with hard, complicated, and sometimes painful experiences, and contribute to difficult conversations. It values the knowledge we bring and values the knowledge and experience of the communities we work in. As researcher, teacher, social worker, therapist, counsellor, or with other professional identity labels we might hold, we come to know ourselves and the worlds we work in differently.
CFH provides an opportunity for white ‘settler’, and others, to explore and understand our histories in a richer and more human way. Furthermore, it provides us with the potential to understand the complexity of an identity forged out of a relationship with Other.
Both CAE and CFH provide a way to engage with difficult knowledge, to speak with the ghosts that haunt a colonial past, to recognise positionality and interrogate privilege, to become part of the conversation to move toward transformation and justice, rather than becoming paralysed. It is a research which provokes, not represents, knowledge (Pitt & Briztman, 2015, p. 769). It is research that works to engage with the complexity of difficult knowledge.
However a few thoughts I am still mulling over. How do we ensure the student/researcher is able to do this work safely, this is a vulnerable space to work in. How do we ensure they have the skills to think, to read theory and critically write as a method of inquiry? To deliberatively plug into theory, into writing, to create a “living bod[y] of thought (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 8). How do we ensure they are ethical in their telling and writing of stories.
ReferencesAdams, T. E., Holman-Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2014). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford University Press.
Bell A. & Ream, R. (2021). “Troubling Pākehā relations to place,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 10.1 (2021): 97-116. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2021.10.1.97
Britzman, D. P. (2013). Between psychoanalysis and pedagogy: Scenes of rapprochement. Curriculum Inquiry, 43.1 (2013): 95-117.
Derrida, J. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.
Fitzpatrick, E., & Mullen, M. (2019). Writing innovative narratives to capture the complexity of lived experience: Poetry, scriptwriting and prose. In S. Farquhar & E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Innovations in narrative and metaphor: Methodologies and practices (pp. 73–93). Springer Nature.
Fitzpatrick, E. (2018). Hauntology and Pākehā: Disrupting the Notion of Homogeneity. In Mana Tangatarua: Mixed heritages, Ethnic Identity and Biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Eds. Zarine L. Rocha and Melinda Webber, Routledge, 2018, pp. 193-213.
Fitzpatrick, E. (2021). A Year of Encounters with Privilege. Handbook of Autoethnography, 2nd ed., edited by Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman-Jones and Carolyn Ellis, Routledge, 2021.
Fitzpatrick, E. (2023). Crafting Criticality Into My Wayfaring Jewish Ancestors’ Colonial Trade Connections. In Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft & Visual Culture Education, Ed. Manisha Sharma and Amanda Alexandra. Routledge.
Fúnez-Flores, , I, Díaz Beltrán, I & Jupp, J. (2022). Decolonial Discourses and Practices: Geopolitical Contexts, Intellectual Genealogies, and Situated Pedagogies, Educational Studies, 596-619. DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2022.2132393
Garrett, H. J., & Segall, A. (2013). (Re)considerations of ignorance and resistance in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(4), 294-304.
Holman Jones, S. (2015). Living bodies of thought: The “critical” in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/ 10.177/1077800415622509
Hoskins, TK &Jones, A. (2022). Indigenous inclusion and Indigenising the University. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies. 57, (2022): 305-320. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-022-00264-1
Leonardo, Z. (2015). Contracting race: writing, racism, and education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 86-98. doi:10.1080/17508487.2015.981197
Pitt, A. & Britzman, D. (2015). Speculations on qualitities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: an experiment in psychoanalytic research, Qualitative Studies in Education. 16 (6), 755-776. DOU: 10.1080/09518390310001632135.
Sleeter, C. (2020). Critical Family History: An Introduction. Genealogy, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1-6. doi:10.3390/genealogy4020064
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.
St. Pierre, E. (2014). An always already absent collaboration. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(4), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708614530309
|
