What are the stories and methods that might contribute to researching our ways out of the ruins of the Anthropocene?

Shared by ALICIA FLYNN

What are the stories and methods that might contribute to researching our ways out of the ruins of the Anthropocene? Based on generous scholarly practices, including feminist diffractive reading (Haraway, 1997; Barad, 2007), a new methodology is emerging in my PhD research that I am calling compostography. Common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), and other feminist methods and stories that pick up on how we are always already becoming-with others (Haraway, 2016) are disrupting humanistic qualitative methods and making new methodologies necessary (Lather & St Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2015).  Haraway muses, seriously, that “we are humus, not Homo, not Anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman” (2016, p. 55) signposting her relational ‘compostist’ ontology.  Inspired by Haraway’s ontology, I offer compostography as a more-than-human methodology, for researching our way out of the Anthropocene. What would you add to this compost heap?

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References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lather, P. & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6): 629-633.

MacLure, M. (2015). The ‘new materialisms’: a thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M.S. Perez & P. Pasque (eds) Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. California: Left Coast Press.

Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529.