How we work
Our goal is to explore what we wear and how we act when we, as humans, do not position ourselves above and outside nature but alongside and within it. We aim to do research relationally with both land and the people living on it.
We are looking to challenge ourselves and the ways we traditionally do work, and to think through questions around who has power in such situations and what it means to give back. A big part of the project is to try out methods that open up these spaces.
Methods and concepts we work with
Relational accountability
Relational accountability is an Indigenous and decolonial approach to partnerships, rooted in the understanding that all relationships – between people, communities, lands, and knowledges – are reciprocal, interconnected, and interdependent.
Shawn Wilson (2001) uses the term to describe the honest accounting of Indigenous research in relation to the people their research refers to (and therefore establishes a relationship with). “As a researcher,” Wilson (2001) asserts, “you are answering to all your relations”: implying that your research ought to (1) know its relations and (2) gain knowledge “so as to fulfill [your] end of the relationship” (p. 177).
Reference:
Wilson, S. (2001). What is an Indigenous research methodology?. Canadian journal of native education, 25(2).
Access the article here (ojs.library.ubc.ca).
Ecoportraiture
What changes in research when it is not just humans whose ideas are is sought and acknowledged? And how research be accountable to the voices and agency of such more-than-human teachers, interlocutors, and kin? These have become pressing questions in an era of soaring interest in forest and nature schools, place- and land-based education. Ecoportraiture offers theoretical and practical guidance into an emerging methodology with deep roots in the anti-racist, emancipatory research tradition of portraiture initiated by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis. Ecoportraiture seeks to evoke and to guide journeys of knowing that are both profoundly ecological and profoundly personal. This is an open-ended and transformative methodology: one that is less about finding answers than about asking better questions—about learning to participate more deeply, as student, teacher, parent, community member, and/or co-researcher, in the conversations of the Earth.
Life Writing as an Ecological Research Method
Life writing is a research method to uncover new insights about the interrelationships between beings and place including with fashion and clothing. In it, the practice of using oneself as a site of enquiry is presented as a route to ecological understanding where finite, direct experience builds towards rooted, embodied, plural and relational knowing about how we live and how we respond to the ecological crisis. Throughout, the paper is supplemented with reflections from the practice of nature-clothing life writing. Read this article to explore the method further (tandfonline.com).