- Barad employs what they describe as a diffractive methodology to "think[] insights from different disciplines (and interdisciplinary approaches) through one another" (2007, 93). A diffractive methodology differs from a diffractive apparatus, for, as articulated above, apparatuses are boundary making practices not experimental setups, methods, tactics, or otherwise agencies of observation. Indeed, apparatuses are the very practices responsible for differentially articulating the agencies of observation and the object of observation within a phenomenon. Diffraction phenomena are at times the object of investigation, at other times, the apparatus of investigation, though never both at once (Barad 2007, 73). I understand engaging a diffractive methodology to be the negotiation of this entanglement––an exploration through the iterative interplay of generating interferences and studying diffraction patterns to understand how differences come to matter. + Barad employs what they describe as a diffractive methodology to "think[] insights from different disciplines (and interdisciplinary approaches) through one another" (2007, 93). A diffractive methodology differs from a diffractive apparatus, for, as articulated above, apparatuses are boundary making practices not experimental setups, methods, tactics, or otherwise agencies of observation. Indeed, apparatuses are the very practices responsible for differentially articulating the agencies of observation and the object of observation within a phenomenon. Diffraction phenomena are at times the object of investigation, at other times, the apparatus of investigation, though never both at once (Barad 2007, 73). I understand engaging a diffractive methodology to be the negotiation of this entanglement––an exploration through the iterative interplay of generating interferences and studying diffraction patterns to understand how differences come to matter. Such has been the exercise of my master's research-creation.
-Diffractive reading is about reading through rather than against: interference rather than opposition, diffraction rather than reflection. "Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations;" says Barad in an interview, "they are good to think with" (Barad in van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012). Drawing from Barad and Haraway, Murris and Bozalek (2019) develop propositions for guiding diffractive readings of literature. What I find most admirable is that they do so by putting Barad's diffractive methodology into practice. Their article marks the effects of their diffractive reading of 1. propositions generated through another exercise in diffractive reading, and 2. their article itself. Thus, in the process of formation, their article serves as a diffractive apparatus for generating interferences while what's rendered through publication is a diffraction pattern marking the effects of their interference practice. They write: +
Diffractive reading is about reading through rather than against: interference rather than opposition, diffraction rather than reflection. "Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations;" says Barad in an interview, "they are good to think with" (in van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012). Drawing from Barad and Haraway, Murris and Bozalek (2019) develop propositions for guiding diffractive readings of literature. What I find most admirable is that they do so by putting Barad's diffractive methodology into practice. Their article marks the effects of their diffractive reading of 1. propositions generated through another exercise in diffractive reading, and 2. their article itself. Thus, in the process of formation, their article serves as a diffractive apparatus for generating interferences while what's rendered through publication is a diffraction pattern marking the effects of their interference practice. They write:
The challenge in adopting diffraction as a methodology is not to theorise the diffraction pattern (a logic of representation), but to put it into practice, thereby disrupting the theory/practice binary. The idea is to read theory with practice diffractively guided by, for example, key questions that move the experiment forward. (Murris and Bozalek 2019, 1505, emphasis in original)
- This is what I have attempted to do in my master's research-creation by theorizing deep mapping through practicing deep mapping and enacting my theory as praxis in ongoing iteration. I encountered Haraway (1991) and then Barad (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015) a few months after I first theorized deep mapping as constructive interference. My thinking diffracted through agential realism. I refigured my theory of deep mapping from constructive interference to interference in general (both constructive and destructive), for superpositioned positionalities need not be aligned nor must their interference amplify the value of some property. Writing this page in particular has urged me to think about the questions that drive my experimentation forward. As Natalie Loveless (2019) writes in her manifesto for research-creation, "the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics" (95, emphasis in original). The framing of a question is a boundary drawing practice which shapes the field of possible responses. Like any other page of my thesis (and my thesis itself), I did not begin this page knowing what it would be about beyond interference. Writing this page has been a difficult practice, the effects of which are only just now becoming articulate. At this point, I am finding that writing negative-spaces/interference.html is helping me think through my research question with the theory I have read since its initial formulation in mind.
+ This is what I have attempted to do in my master's research-creation by theorizing deep mapping through practicing deep mapping and enacting my theory as praxis in ongoing iteration. I encountered Haraway (1991) and then Barad (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015) a few months after I first theorized deep mapping as constructive interference. My thinking diffracted through agential realism, and I refigured my theory of deep mapping from constructive interference to interference in general (both constructive and destructive), for superpositioned positionalities need not be aligned nor must their interference amplify the value of some property. Writing this page in particular has urged me to think about the questions that drive my experimentation forward. As Natalie Loveless (2019) asserts in her manifesto for research-creation, "the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics" (95, emphasis in original). The framing of a question is a boundary drawing practice which influences the field of possible responses. Like any other page of my thesis (and my thesis itself), I did not begin knowing what it would be about beyond interference. Writing this page day after day has been a challenging practice, the effects of which are only just now coming into focus. At this point, I find that writing negative-spaces/interference.html is helping me think my research question through the theory I have metabolized since its inception.
My research-creation asked, 'What could it mean to think with place? to feel the city?'
- Responding to this question invites an exploration of what it might mean to think, to think with, to feel, as well as the boundary making practices involved in citing "place" and "the city" as interlocutors. Rather than offer an authoritative definition, I diffract these questions (and by extension my initial question) through some of the physical-conceptual field of my encounter. The goal of my master's research-creation was never to answer my initial question, but rather to explore and respond to it through deep mapping. Therefore, my exploration and response to my initial inquiry and its attendant provocations has been, and continues to be, diffracted through the effects of my simultaneous exploration and response to the question, 'What is deep mapping?' + Responding to this question invites an exploration of what it might mean to think, to think with, to feel, as well as the boundary making practices involved in citing "place" and "the city" as interlocutors. Rather than offer any authoritative definitions, I diffract these questions (and by extension my initial question) through some of the physical-conceptual field of my encounter. Note: the goal of my master's research-creation was never to answer my initial question but rather to explore and respond to it through deep mapping. Therefore, my exploration and response to my initial inquiry and its attendant provocations has been, and continues to be, diffracted through the effects of my simultaneous exploration and response to the question, 'What is deep mapping?'
@@ -299,45 +299,48 @@
Deep mapping is constructive interference with the superficial reflection that is place rendered (down from above) by flat maps. Mapping deeply requires entering the landscape––putting one’s self into the field––and emerging to render a cartography beyond the monochrome.
- What I was gesturing towards was how deep mapping was for me an interference practice, rather than one of opposition. It was in this sense that I became cautious of describing deep mapping as a counter cartography, for, to me, it did not seem to counter cartography so much as describe a practice aimed at articulating alternate possible spatial stories through interfering with those defined by totalizing abstractions. While I recognized deep mapping could not occur from a remove, I did assume a preexisting exterior to "the field" from which one stepped "into" the field and then "emerged". Such an initial conceptualization is unsurprising given the literature through which I came upon deep mapping.
+ What I was gesturing towards was how deep mapping was for me an interference practice, rather than one of opposition. It was in this sense that I became cautious of describing deep mapping as a counter cartography (see Mason-Deese 2020), for, to me, it did not seem to counter cartography so much as describe a practice aimed at articulating alternate possible spatial stories through interfering with those defined by totalizing abstractions. While I recognized deep mapping could not occur from a remove, I did assume a preexisting exterior to "the field" from which one stepped "into" the field and then "emerged". Such an initial conceptualization is unsurprising given the literature through which I came upon deep mapping.
- My first introduction to deep mapping was Les Roberts' work which I encountered in 2020 during my undergraduate thesis research on critical and creative cartographies. This was at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic had recently shuttered my undergraduate campus, forcing me into isolation in rural Maine. Roberts editorials (2016a, 2018a) for his two Humanities special issues were the first creative scholarly publications I ever read after Eric Magrane's The Earth is a Composted Poem (2020). Immersed as I was in physical geography and geographic information science, deep mapping and the concept of spatial bricolage (see negative-spaces/tactics.html) seemed to offer just the open-ended and expressive form of fieldwork I yearned for. When the world as mediated through my phone became increasingly unintelligible, wandering the woods made more and more sense. I began leaving familiar pathways and cultivating spatial awareness guided by landmarks such as uprooted trees, wetlands, and boulders. I attended to alternate perceptual scales, kneeling to observe trumpet lichen pushing up from rotting trees and listen for water gurgling underground in spring (Demet 2021). Roberts (2016b) calls deep mapping "an embodied and reflexive immersion in a life that is lived and performed spatially. A cartography of depth. A diving within" (XIV, emphasis in original). Deep mapping, he elaborates in a subsequent publication, "presupposes the embodied presence of the researcher 'within' the space under investigation" (Roberts 2018x, 11). Reflexivity is central to Roberts' formulation of deep mapping, which presupposes the human body as differentiated from the nonhuman, an individual which will have embodied experiences upon which to reflect. Roberts understands "space as a symbolically expressive and embodied engagement with the everyday world(s) we inhabit and pass through. Space as a constitutive component of everyday being. Space as lived. Life as spaced" (2018a, 28). David Crouch (2003) compares notions of embodied practice with those of performance and performativity to explore how identity is constituted through encounters with space. Crouch develops 'spacing' as a term which "identifies subjective and practical ways in which the individual handles his or her material surroundings. Spacing is positioned in terms of action, making sense (including the refiguring of 'given' space), and mechanisms of opening up possibilities" (Crouch 2003, 1945). "There is a particular sensuousness and a tactile way of knowing that is central to everydayness," he writes in a later publication (Crouch 2010, 64), though thinking and feeling remain human pursuits engaged relationally with "materiality and non-human life" (63). For Crouch (2003, 2010) as for Roberts (2016b, 2018a), the human body is already differentiated from their nonhuman, material surroundings which are sensed and made sense of through an embodied positionality. For both, space is intentionally left nebulous, constituted as something an individual can be "'within'" or that which is "'given'", but also something lived, performed, and open to reconfigurations. Discussing vitalist geographies, Beth Greenhough (2011, 41) writes, "space and time are brought into being simultaneously with the actualisation of a given phenomenon." This may seem to echo Barad (2007), for whom space, time, and matter are phenomena (316) "mutually constituted through the dynamics of iterative intra-activity" (181). I am not as yet well versed in non-representational theory or more-than-human geography, so cannot make generalized statements about vitalist geographies. I have instead attempted to read agential realism's posthuman performativity through this account of vitalist geographies and the handful of related literature I've read, marking similarities and differences in how agency and the human|nonhuman boundary are figured. I am particularly invested in how the apparatuses through which differential embodiment is constituted effect different possibilities for knowing. This is something I intend to further study during my PhD. + My first introduction to deep mapping was the work of Les Roberts which I encountered in 2020 during my undergraduate research into critical and creative cartographies. This was at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic had recently shuttered my undergraduate campus, forcing me into isolation in rural Maine. Roberts editorials (2016b, 2018c) for his two Humanities special issues (2016a, 2018a) were the first creative scholarly publications I ever read after Eric Magrane's Climate Geopoetics (2020). Immersed as I was in physical geography and geographic information science, deep mapping and the concept of spatial bricolage (see negative-spaces/tactics.html) seemed to offer just the open-ended and expressive form of fieldwork I yearned for. When the world as mediated through my phone became increasingly cacophonous, wandering the woods made more and more sense. I began leaving familiar pathways and cultivating spatial awareness guided by landmarks such as uprooted trees, wetlands, and boulders. I attended to alternate perceptual scales, kneeling to observe trumpet lichen pushing up from rotting trees and listen for water gurgling underground in spring (Demet 2021). Roberts (2016b) calls deep mapping "an embodied and reflexive immersion in a life that is lived and performed spatially. A cartography of depth. A diving within" (XIV, emphasis in original). Deep mapping, he elaborates in a subsequent publication, "presupposes the embodied presence of the researcher 'within' the space under investigation" (Roberts 2018a, 11). Reflexivity is central to Roberts' formulation of deep mapping. Embodiment, by virtue of being in reference to the researcher, at once presupposes the differentiation of bodies human and nonhuman and enacts that distinction. Roberts understands "space as a symbolically expressive and embodied engagement with the everyday world(s) we inhabit and pass through. Space as a constitutive component of everyday being. Space as lived. Life as spaced" (2018a, 28). David Crouch (2003) compares notions of embodied practice with those of performance and performativity to explore how identity is constituted through encounters with space. Crouch develops 'spacing' as a term which "identifies subjective and practical ways in which the individual handles his or her material surroundings. Spacing is positioned in terms of action, making sense (including the refiguring of 'given' space), and mechanisms of opening up possibilities" (Crouch 2003, 1945). "There is a particular sensuousness and a tactile way of knowing that is central to everydayness," he writes in a later publication (Crouch 2010, 64), though thinking and feeling remain human pursuits engaged relationally with "materiality and non-human life" (63). For Crouch (2003, 2010) as for Roberts (2016b, 2018a, 2018c), the human body is already differentiated from their nonhuman, material surroundings which are sensed and made sense of through an embodied positionality. For both, space is intentionally left nebulous, constituted at once as something an individual can be "'within'" or that which is "'given'", and also something lived, performed, and open to reconfigurations. Discussing vitalist geographies, Beth Greenhough (2011) writes, "space and time are brought into being simultaneously with the actualisation of a given phenomenon" (41). This may seem to echo Barad (2007), for whom space, time, and matter are phenomena (316) "mutually constituted through the dynamics of iterative intra-activity" (181). I am not as yet well versed in non-representational theory or the more-than-human turn, so cannot make generalized statements about vitalist geographies. I have instead attempted to read agential realism's posthuman performativity through this account of vitalist geographies and the handful of related literature I've read, marking similarities and differences in how agency and the human|nonhuman boundary are figured. I am particularly invested in how the apparatuses through which differential embodiment is constituted effect different possibilities for knowing. This is something I intend to further study during my PhD.
- For Greenhough, the vitalism of vitalist geographies extends "agency (the power to sense the world)...to all living beings" (2011, 41). What constitutes living beings is never articulated, however. The boundary drawing practices by which living is differentiated from the nonliving and human bodies from those nonhuman remain unaccounted for. If sense is the capacity of living beings (Greenhough 2011), then the promiscuous self-touching of physical and virtual subatomic particles and the yearning with which they reach out towards one another (Barad 2012, 2015) can be adduced to illustrate how all matter is vital. "There is a vitality to the liveliness of intra-activity," Writes Barad, "not in the sense of a new form of vitalism, but rather in terms of a new sense of aliveness" (2007, 177). Agency in agential realism is not ascribed based on 'sense,' 'living,' and 'being,' for such properties are themselves constituted through intra-activity and therefore are not intrinsic to an already individuated part of the word. Writes Barad, "human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity" (Barad 2007, 172). Barad's posthuman performativity extends Foucault and Butler's analyses on the materialization of bodies by attending how matter itself comes to matter, and to the apparatuses through which human and nonhuman bodies are differentially constituted. Writes Barad, "In an agential realist account, performativity is understood not as iterative citationality (Butler) but as iterative intra-activity" (2007, 184, emphasis in original). Thus, Embodiment is a matter not of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity" (Barad 2007, 377, emphasis in original). As noted earlier, rendering an intelligible form with determinate properties is a boundary making practice which necessitates exclusions. So, while vitalist geographies regard agency as the capacity to sense (Greenhough 2011), within agential realism's posthuman performativity, "agency is the space of possibilities opened up by the indeterminacies entailed in exclusions" (Barad 2007, 182). + For Greenhough, the vitalism of vitalist geographies extends "agency (the power to sense the world)...to all living beings" (2011, 41). What constitutes living beings is never articulated, however. The boundary drawing practices by which living is differentiated from the nonliving and human bodies from those nonhuman remain unaccounted for. If sense is the capacity of living beings (Greenhough 2011), then the promiscuous self-touching of physical and virtual subatomic particles and the yearning with which they reach out towards one another (Barad 2012, 2015) can be adduced to illustrate how all matter is vital. "There is a vitality to the liveliness of intra-activity," Writes Barad, "not in the sense of a new form of vitalism, but rather in terms of a new sense of aliveness" (2007, 177). Agency in agential realism is not ascribed based on 'sense', 'living', and 'being', for such properties are themselves constituted through intra-activity and therefore are not intrinsic to an already individuated part of the word. Writes Barad, "human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity" (Barad 2007, 172). Thus, Embodiment is a matter not of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity" (Barad 2007, 377, emphasis in original). Barad's posthuman performativity (2003, 2007) extends Foucault and Butler's analyses on the materialization of bodies by attending how matter itself comes to matter, and to the apparatuses through which human and nonhuman bodies are differentially constituted. Writes Barad (2007), "In an agential realist account, performativity is understood not as iterative citationality (Butler) but as iterative intra-activity" (184, emphasis in original). As noted earlier, rendering an intelligible form with determinate properties is a boundary making practice which necessitates exclusions. So, while vitalist geographies regard agency as the capacity to sense (Greenhough 2011), within agential realism's posthuman performativity, "agency is the space of possibilities opened up by the indeterminacies entailed in exclusions" (Barad 2007, 182).
- -When I first began my master's I checked out A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies (2017) from the library. This lovely collection of thoughtful interventions offered more open-ended engagement with the world than did Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), a dense edition purchased for my required methods course (which happened to be in anthropology). I admit I did not make it very far in the latter text. Perhaps I will revisit it during my PhD in which I will engage more 'human subjects,' reading it diffractively through other approaches to data 'collection'. Dara Culhane contributes a chapter to A Different Kind of Ethnography on sensing. She writes, "Sensory ethnography not only privileges lived, embodied, and affective knowledge, but also focuses on intersubjectivity and the co-creation of such knowledge" (60). Culhane understands affect as "feelings generated by––and, like embodiment, circulating through––relationships among people" (54). Moreover, "Intersubjectivity is the space of thinking/feeling/doing/being created by people interacting with each other in and through social relationships" (56, emphasis in original). Exercises for the reader to take out into the field are reflexive, privileging the human sensory apparatus. For Culhane, knowledge produced through sensing and sensory ethnography is that which is felt from an already constituted human body in interactive relation to other presupposed humans. The co-creation of lived, embodied, and affective knowledge is therefore constrained to feelings circulating amongst people. What about sensing with a bridge where infrastructure fleshy and concrete is made differentially intelligible through visceral encounter? + When I first began my master's I checked out A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies (2017) from the library. This collection of thoughtful everyday interventions offered more open-ended engagement with the world than did Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), a dense edition purchased for my required methods course (which happened to be in Anthropology). I admit I did not make it very far in the latter text. Perhaps I will revisit it during my PhD in which I will engage more 'human subjects', reading it diffractively through other approaches to data 'collection'. Dara Culhane (2017) contributes a chapter to A Different Kind of Ethnography on sensing. She writes, "Sensory ethnography not only privileges lived, embodied, and affective knowledge, but also focuses on intersubjectivity and the co-creation of such knowledge" (Culhane 2017, 60). Culhane understands affect as "feelings generated by––and, like embodiment, circulating through––relationships among people" (2017, 54). Moreover, "Intersubjectivity is the space of thinking/feeling/doing/being created by people interacting with each other in and through social relationships" (56, emphasis in original). Exercises for the reader to take out into the field are reflexive, privileging the human sensory apparatus. So long as affect is sensed from an already human embodiment, knowledge can only be co-created with humans by humans.
- 'Place dialogue' (Adams and Kotus 2022) and 'lyric geography' (Acker 2019) gesture towards 'situated knowledges' of place in that their "object of knowledge is engaged as actor and agent (Haraway 1988, 592). Place dialogue assumes places as interlocutors and more-than-human agents; "Place dialogue is about the meaningfulness of embodiment in a place, and the way in which bodily responses to a place are acts of interpretation positioning place as an actor among actors" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 3). Recollecting her fieldwork for a PhD in geopoetics, Maleea Acker writes, "Place impels me; it is the actor. Place also unfurls around me; it becomes the subject" (2019, 132). Acker's lyric geography takes shape as a commonplace, her own writing on the left-hand pages in dialogue with human interlocutors on the right. Referencing her time in Ajijic, Mexico, she writes, "My geographical practice, similarly, acknowledges walking through places and charting my feelings and the ways in which I interact with people as both a creative practice and a turn toward dwelling at home, toward choosing to engage with place rather than to distance myself from it" (Acker 2019, 154, emphasis in original). This was the mentality with which I arrived to Vancouver. I first encountered Acker's work in Geopoetics in Practice (2019), an edited collection by Eric Magrane I read during my undergraduate honors thesis. The ideas therein set the tone for my journey to Vancouver and the subsequent journey of my master's in geography whilst getting to know the city of/through my inhabitation. Intentional engagement with place is cultivated as deep mapping by Laura Bissell and David Overend (2015), who turn to their daily commutes. Their attention is guided by four considerations: "first, convergences and divergences of paths and routes and their relationship to the boundaries and barriers that contain and define them; second, notions of becoming, changing and transferring; third, patterns and rhythms of commuting and ways of documenting and analysing these processes; and fourth, the corporeality of commuting as an embodied practice" (Bissell and Overend 2015, 484). Invoking deep mapping as "theory-informed story-telling" (476), their evocative account demonstrates the performative capacity of academics to redefine what counts as fieldwork by leaning into their everyday spatial practices as sites of knowledge production. For Bissell and Overend (2015), as for Adams and Kotus (2022) and Acker (2019), intersubjectivity assumes place as subject. + 'Place dialogue' (Adams and Kotus 2022) and 'lyric geography' (Acker 2019) gesture towards 'situated knowledges' of place in that their "object of knowledge is engaged as actor and agent (Haraway 1988, 592). Place dialogue assumes places as interlocutors and more-than-human agents; "Place dialogue is about the meaningfulness of embodiment in a place, and the way in which bodily responses to a place are acts of interpretation positioning place as an actor among actors" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 3). In this sense, place dialogue is sensory ethnography with place, rather than humans, as the subject. Recollecting her fieldwork for a PhD in geopoetics, Maleea Acker writes, "Place impels me; it is the actor. Place also unfurls around me; it becomes the subject" (2019, 132). Acker's lyric geography takes shape as a literary commonplace, her own writing on the left-hand pages in dialogue with human interlocutors on the right. Referencing her time in Ajijic, Mexico, she writes, "My geographical practice, similarly, acknowledges walking through places and charting my feelings and the ways in which I interact with people as both a creative practice and a turn toward dwelling at home, toward choosing to engage with place rather than to distance myself from it" (Acker 2019, 154, emphasis in original). This was the mentality with which I arrived to Vancouver. I first encountered Acker's work in Geopoetics in Practice (2019), an edited collection I read during my undergraduate thesis. The ideas/stories/people therein set the tone for my journey to Vancouver and the subsequent journey of working towards an MA in geography whilst getting to know the city of/through my inhabitation. Intentional engagement with place is cultivated as deep mapping by Laura Bissell and David Overend (2015), who turn to their daily commutes as a site for 'performative counterpractice'. Their attention is guided by four considerations: "first, convergences and divergences of paths and routes and their relationship to the boundaries and barriers that contain and define them; second, notions of becoming, changing and transferring; third, patterns and rhythms of commuting and ways of documenting and analysing these processes; and fourth, the corporeality of commuting as an embodied practice" (Bissell and Overend 2015, 484). Invoking deep mapping as "theory-informed story-telling" (476), their evocative account demonstrates the capacity of academics to redefine what counts as fieldwork by leaning into their everyday spatial practices as sites of knowledge production. For Bissell and Overend (2015), as for Adams and Kotus (2022) and Acker (2019), the intersubjectivity which assumes place as a subject also assumes place "as an entity" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 3), with preexisting boundaries and determinate properties which, with more concerted attention on the part of the human, will reveal themselves. Intersubjectivity where place becomes the/a subject is still about discreet bodies interacting.
- As shared in negative-spaces/disorientation.html, it was while riding the 33 bus route that I realized the city is not a site with fixed boundaries and determinate properties which preexist encounter and which I, as inhabitant-geographer-cartographer, may irresponsibly separate myself from in order to map from a distanced, exterior position. Rather, the city is performatively constituted as a physical-conceptual field whose emergent topology is iteratively drawn through everyday navigations and encounters. As such, the city of my inhabitation and I are entangled, figured and continuously reconfiguring in dynamic relation. Writes Greenhough (2011): "fieldwork is more than a process of data collection; it is an event through which the researcher and the researched are resituated or repositioned in the world, and thereby are engaged in remaking the world through the process of their encounters" (48). Field and researcher, equipped as they are with tactics of investigation, are provisional configurations, intra-actively constituting one another within the entanglement of encounter. Murris and Bozalek (2019) continue:
+ As shared in negative-spaces/disorientation.html, it was while commuting to campus with the 33 bus, an irregular route for me, that I realized the city is not a site with fixed boundaries and determinate properties which preexist encounter and which I, as inhabitant-geographer-cartographer, may irresponsibly separate myself from in order to map from a distanced, exterior position. Rather, the city is performatively constituted as a physical-conceptual field whose emergent topology is iteratively drawn through everyday navigations and encounters. As such, the city of my inhabitation and I are entangled, figured and continuously reconfiguring in dynamic relation. Writes Greenhough (2011): "fieldwork is more than a process of data collection; it is an event through which the researcher and the researched are resituated or repositioned in the world, and thereby are engaged in remaking the world through the process of their encounters" (48). Field and researcher, equipped as they are with tactics of investigation, are provisional configurations which intra-actively constitute one another within the entanglement of encounter. Murris and Bozalek (2019) continue:
As a researcher is one part of the world, hence a diffractive reading is unlike a literature review as the latter assumes that you are at a distance of the literature, having a bird's eye point of view - creating an overview by comparing, contrasting, juxtaposing or looking for similarities and themes. A diffractive reading, on the other hand, does not foreground any texts as foundational, but through reading texts through one another, comes to new insights. (1505-1506)
- Though not foregrounding any one text, diffractive reading is "rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a given field without uncritically endorsing or unconditionally prioritizing one (inter)disciplinary approach over another" (Barad 2007, 93). A diffractive methodology attends to the relational ontology of agential realism (Barad 2007, 389) rather than a flat ontology. Drawing from deep mapping literatures and practices, Springett (2015) offers the spatiotemporal descriptor of 'deep' rather than 'flat' to gesture towards the democratization of knowledge through enactments that retain an ethical and political bent by attending to social and ecological hierarchies; for her, deep mapping emerges as a performative practice for decolonizing the way people engage with place. Writing of Indigenous sound art, Sara Nicole England (2019) draws on Candice Hopkins' interpretation of 'deep listening' to explore attentiveness to noise "as a productive medium and gesture toward spatial decolonization" (20). In a colloquium presentation given at Simon Fraser University in 2019, Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen Candice Hopkins describes a practice of decolonial listening:
+ Though not foregrounding any one text, diffractive reading is "rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a given field without uncritically endorsing or unconditionally prioritizing one (inter)disciplinary approach over another" (Barad 2007, 93). A diffractive methodology attends to the relational ontology of agential realism (Barad 2007, 389) rather than a flat ontology. Drawing from deep mapping literatures and practices, Springett (2015) offers the spatiotemporal descriptor of 'deep' rather than 'flat' to gesture towards the democratization of knowledge through enactments that retain an ethical and political bent by attending to social and ecological hierarchies. For her, deep mapping emerges as a performative practice for decolonizing the way people engage with place (Springett 2015, 634). Writing of Indigenous sound art, Sara Nicole England (2019) draws on Candice Hopkins' interpretation of 'deep listening' to explore attentiveness to noise "as a productive medium and gesture toward spatial decolonization" (20). In a colloquium presentation given at Simon Fraser University in 2019, Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen Candice Hopkins describes a practice of decolonial listening:
- Decolonization as we know it is an active practice. It's a verb it's not a metaphor. It's a present process that echoes into the future. And I think that the way to begin with this, the way to bring people to this place, is to first listen to those who are here. So freeing some of the voices wedged beneath dominant history has the possibility, I think, to redress some of the violence that's reduced Indigenous people, Indigenous lives, to numbers and ciphers and fragments of discourse. And perhaps by dwelling in these fragments, by spending time in the discomfort of the incomplete, of listening to the shards that often now stand in for history, it's possible to tune our ears to hear something of these stifled voices. The politics of colonial entanglement offer the possibility not only to hear what is sounding but also to listen to the silences as well. (19:33-20:32, punctuation added)
+ Decolonization as we know it is an active practice. It's a verb it's not a metaphor. It's a present process that echoes into the future. And I think that the way to begin with this, the way to bring people to this place, is to first listen to those who are here. So freeing some of the voices wedged beneath dominant history has the possibility, I think, to redress some of the violence that's reduced Indigenous people, Indigenous lives, to numbers and ciphers and fragments of discourse. And perhaps by dwelling in these fragments, by spending time in the discomfort of the incomplete, of listening to the shards that often now stand in for history, it's possible to tune our ears to hear something of these stifled voices. The politics of colonial entanglement offer the possibility not only to hear what is sounding but also to listen to the silences as well. (Towards a Practice of Decolonial Listening: Sounding the Margins | Candice Hopkins 2019, 19:33-20:32, punctuation added)
- England (2019) considers how the differentiation of sound from noise reveals a value judgment through which the listener marginalizes sounds they find unintelligible. Rejecting harmony, England asks, "might listening to noise suggest an attentiveness to difference?" (2019, 16). Citing Hopkins' description of "noise as a cacophony" and Jack Halberstam's contextualization of cacophony within colonial structures (see Halberstam 2013), England writes, "Attending to cacophony, then, is at once a recognition of intelligible structures and a transgression of them" (2019, 16). Herself a settler on unceded Indigenous lands, England understands participating in Indigenous-led projects as a way to situate her academic research (England 2018). I am a settler on unceded and ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, carrying out my research practice within and as part of a settler colonial city and institution of higher education. Producing situated knowledges thus necessitates attention to the ways in which my research is entangled with the settler colonial history of Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands. I recognize that this remains a conspicuous silence in my current work. As I continue to think and practice deep mapping over the next four years of my PhD, I am committed to reading, citing, and thinking with more decolonial geography and Indigenous scholarship related to place making and spatial navigation. I recognize I have much to learn of the history of Vancouver and this place before it became Vancouver. Whilst dispossession is ongoing, First Nations are also actors in the city's economy. For example, near where I live, construction has begun on an 11-tower apartment development on Squamish owned land spearheaded by the Squamish First Nation in partnership with Westbank (Cyca 2024). Ian Biggs describes deep mapping as an 'essaying' of place that is about "interweaving many disparate, tensioned strands of experience, genres of writing, knowledge positions and narrative perspectives so as to produce a richer, more resonant patterning of meaning while retaining the pleasures of discrete threads within the larger whole" (Biggs 2010, emphasis in original). Like a diffractive reading, such an interweaving remains cognizant of differences while feeling for resonances. Something about this for decolonial deep mapping of urban ecology here.
+ England (2019) considers how the unconscious differentiation of sound from noise reveals a value judgment through which the listener marginalizes sounds they find unintelligible. Rejecting harmony, England asks, "might listening to noise suggest an attentiveness to difference?" (2019, 16). Citing Hopkins' description of "noise as a cacophony" and Jack Halberstam's contextualization of cacophony within colonial structures (see Halberstam 2013), England writes, "Attending to cacophony, then, is at once a recognition of intelligible structures and a transgression of them" (2019, 16).
+
+ Herself a settler on unceded Indigenous lands, England understands participating in Indigenous-led projects as a way to situate her academic research (England 2018). I am a settler on the unceded and ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, carrying out my research practice within and as part of a settler colonial city and institution of higher education. Producing situated knowledges thus necessitates attention to the ways in which my research is entangled with the settler colonial history of Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands, as well as ongoing dispossession. I recognize that this remains a conspicuous silence in my current work. As I continue to think and practice deep mapping over the next four years of my PhD, I am committed to reading, citing, and thinking with more decolonial geography and Indigenous scholarship related to place making and spatial navigation. I recognize I have much to learn of the history of Vancouver and this place before colonization. Additionally, since much of my focus surrounds everyday navigation and encounters with urban infrastructure, future research will include a more thorough examination of the ways in which First Nations are also actors and agents in the urbanization of Vancouver's landscape. For example, near where I live, construction has begun on an 11-tower apartment development on Squamish owned land spearheaded by the Squamish First Nation in partnership with Westbank (Cyca 2024; “History of the Sen̓áḵw Lands” 2024). Ian Biggs describes deep mapping as an 'essaying' of place that is about "interweaving many disparate, tensioned strands of experience, genres of writing, knowledge positions and narrative perspectives so as to produce a richer, more resonant patterning of meaning while retaining the pleasures of discrete threads within the larger whole" (Biggs 2010, emphasis in original). Like a diffractive reading, such an interweaving remains cognizant of differences while feeling for resonances. Something about this for decolonial deep mapping of urban ecology here.
- In negative-spaces/disorientation.html, I wrote that deep mapping eluded operationalization in its interpretive capaciousness (Roberts 2016; Modeen and Biggs 2020). This is not to say that theories and practices of deep mapping are never dissonant. Contrasting two publications on deep mapping Modeen and Biggs (2020) mark the distinction between approaches which are "literalist and instrumentalist" and those which are "scholarly and creative" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 52). Interestly, both publications share many of the same citations. It comes as no surprise that the authors of the "literalist and instrumentalist" approach went on to publish an edited volume concerned with articulating methods of making deep maps (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris 2021). Modeen and Biggs (2020) choose Deep Mapping (2016), the Humanities special issue edited by Les Roberts as their "scholarly and creative" exemplar. As discussed in the preceding section, my thinking and practice are deeply diffracted through Roberts' work. However, reading Barad through my understanding of deep mapping as influenced by Roberts has led to me think more carefully about boundaries and how they are drawn. Given my hesitation to identify with either capacious approach to deep mapping laid out by Modeen and Biggs (2020), I wonder if my interest in posthuman embodiment may be indicative of a third strand of deep mapping practice, one which remains scholarly and creative while not presupposing the existence of intelligible formations such as human, space, time, data, or the field. That is, perhaps such entities can only be objectively referenced as entangled states, the researcher and tactics of investigation within and as part of the phenomenon within which such properties become differentially determinate. + In negative-spaces/disorientation.html, I wrote that deep mapping eluded operationalization in its interpretive capaciousness (Roberts 2016; Modeen and Biggs 2020). This is not to say that theories and practices of deep mapping are never dissonant. Contrasting two publications on deep mapping Modeen and Biggs (2020) mark a distinction between approaches which are "literalist and instrumentalist" and those which are "scholarly and creative" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 52). Interestly, both publications share many of the same citations. It comes as no surprise that the authors of the "literalist and instrumentalist" approach who wrote "A deep map is . . . an environment embedded with tools to bring data into an explicit and direct relationship with space and time" (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris 2015, quoted in Modeen and Biggs 2020, page) went on to publish an edited volume concerned with articulating methods of making deep maps (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris 2021). Modeen and Biggs (2020) choose Deep Mapping (2016), the Humanities special issue edited by Les Roberts as their "scholarly and creative" exemplar. As discussed in the preceding section, my thinking and practice are deeply diffracted through Roberts' work. However, reading Barad through my understanding of deep mapping as influenced by Roberts has led to me think more carefully about boundaries and how they are drawn. Given my hesitation to identify with either capacious approach to deep mapping laid out by Modeen and Biggs (2020), I wonder if my interest in posthuman embodiment may be indicative of a third strand of deep mapping practice, one which remains scholarly and creative while not presupposing the existence or intelligibility of formations such as human, space, time, data, or the field. That is, perhaps such entities can only be objectively referenced as entangled states, the researcher equipped with tactics of investigation within and as part of specific phenomena within which such boundaries become differentially articulate and properties determinate.
@@ -346,7 +349,6 @@
What I meant by 'deep mapping eludes operationalization', and where I am resonant with Modeen and Biggs' (2020) scholarly and creative approach, is that practice of deep mapping cannot be reduced to a sequence of ordered steps. To do so would be to foreclose the "poetics of paradox and ambiguity essential to open deep mapping" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 53). If anything, contrasting views illuminate how deep mapping cannot be captured by any single strategy, even as self-proclaimed cognoscenti cl/aim to define one. -
@@ -385,7 +387,11 @@ 3 nights now I've woken 3 hours after falling asleep, the conceptual debris which all day circled my mind in an undifferentiated cloud suddenly cohered into orbits such that fully formed sentences carry me from unconscious to consciousness. delta brainwaves. -stuff
What counts as data (without further justification) is often determined by whether the methods employed and fieldsite were already intelligible/legible within the discipline/academy. St. Pierre (2018) describes writing an "aside" about a dream she had involving her study participant. The last sentence she wrote, or which she "did not intentionally write—it wrote itself" was "The aside is the field" (St. Pierre 2018, 605, emphasis in original). This served as the refrain (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) of St. Pierre's dissertation. Long before I encountered postqualitative inquiry, the refrain of my master's has been 'its all the field'.
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+ about linearity, site
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Writes Eric Magrane of geopoetics:
@@ -400,17 +406,14 @@> geopoetics as spacing. -> sense making, grasping - knowing as dist practice here hmmm + could put that up here???
- -I deeply resonate with St. Pierre (2018), drawing form Richardson (1994), that "...writing is also an empirical field of inquiry" (605). As I write this section, the section above is loosely mapped out but uncertain. With a ballpoint pen I write in the margin of the St. Pierre piece: "Is a diffractive reading the most generative way to approach 'incommensurable' methodologies? Are they incommensurable precisely because they have mutually exclusive onto-epistemologies, i.e. "descriptions of human being, language, discourse, power, agency, resistance, freedom, and so on" (St. Pierre 2018, 603)?" If top-down and bottom-up apparatuses of (geospatial) knowledge production are incommensurable approaches, why position them in opposition to one another? A perhaps more generative way of relating them would be to read them through one another. > if not for quantum entanglements, the wave-particle duality remains a paradox. The wave-particle duality of matter would remain a paradox if not for quantum entanglements. Recognizing the entanglement of incommensurable approaches to engaging place, producing geographic knowledge, and rendering spatial research -- openness- "poetics of paradox" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 53) IDK. Incommensurability is the interference of different intelligibility. → Cacophony is a a diffraction pattern marking the interference of incommensurable intelligibility. +
+ I resonate with St. Pierre (2018), drawing form Richardson (1994), that "...writing is also an empirical field of inquiry" (605). As I write this section, the section above is loosely mapped out but uncertain. With a ballpoint pen I write in the margin of the St. Pierre piece: "Is a diffractive reading the most generative way to approach 'incommensurable' methodologies?" Are technoscientific and affective practices of engaging place, producing geographic knowledge, and rendering spatial research public incommensurable precisely because they have mutually exclusive onto-epistemologies, i.e. "descriptions of human being, language, discourse, power, agency, resistance, freedom, and so on" (St. Pierre 2018, 603)? And if they are incommensurable, is "resistance to top-down data practices" (the call for contributions to the panel mentioned above) by positioning so-called top-down and bottom-up apparatuses in opposition to one another the most generative framing? Thinking with my ongoing work in Cartesian cartography, GIS, and deep mapping, I have grown critical of academic framings that render so-called 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' mapping practices in opposition to one another. Both are boundary making practices for configuring worlds. What matters is the effect of their differential articulations of what gets to count––what is included in the frame of an empirical formation. 'Top down' and 'bottom up' mapping practices simply perform different agential cuts, the effects of which do not oppose one another but overlap in the everyday, their interference constituting the entangled viscera of urban bodies as they are rendered differentially intelligible. A perhaps more generative way of relating them would be to read them through one another.
-- It is with postqualitative research in mind that Murris and Bozalek (2019) reference methodology skeptically, preferring to describe their invitations for practicing diffractive reading as 'propositions.' Propositions gleaned through their prior diffractive reading are marked by indentation and an alternate font, each one an invitation to "to live without bodily boundaries by:..." Propositions marking the diffractive reading of the article at hand are differentiated by numbers, though no hierarchy is intended. I read both sets of propositions through my work, interweaving them through explicit citation as relevant. -
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