Fieldwork

Research Background: New materialist and ecocritical theorists including Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Deborah Bird Rose challenge the Western binary between human and nonhuman and its effects on relations of power, agency, narrative and voice. What are the implications for creative arts practice? My research asks: how can place-based creative arts practice engaged with new materialist theory unsettle the hierarchies of human and nonhuman, and how can the formal properties of the literary essay be extended to account for this? Research Contribution: This essay narrates and reflects upon a series of encounters with creative arts researchers on an experimental fieldtrip at Pound Bend, outside Melbourne, observing how divergent creative practices-film-making, photography, sound recording and speculative design-are deployed in experiments of 'thinking through making' (Ingold). It contributes to literary nonfiction practice by testing how a cool formal narrative affect akin to Borges or Calvino might create an effect of disembodied ('posthuman') distance in a braided essay (Walker). In so doing, it considers self-reflexively the ironies inherent in settler researchers conducting 'explorations' on unceded Indigenous land, and opens up further space for public conversation on processes of 'unsettling.' Research Significance: This essay was selected for publication in the Sydney Review of Books' 'New Nature' series. The SRB's mission is to 'publish longform criticism and essays by Australia's best critics, writers and thinkers.' Funded by Create NSW, the New Nature series features leading writers including Delia Falconer, Evelyn Araluen, James Bradley, Julie Koh and Alexis Harley. SRB editor Dr Catriona Menzies-Pike wrote, of 'Fieldwork': "It's exactly the kind of thing I have been seeking to include: experimental, searching, attuned to the particular challenges of writing about the Australian landscape."