Methods & theory

Theory

This research engages theoretical work in global environmental humanities: transdisciplinary, comparative approaches that combine the sciences, social sciences and critical humanities. It is complemented by theory aimed at rethinking sustainability in the wake of extractive capitalism, human exceptionalism, colonialism, gender and race.

This is not a process where, as Nye and colleagues put it, science discovers, industry applies, and the humanities explain to the public what is going on. A humanities-driven approach poses fundamentally different questions — questions of value and meaning, informed by a nuanced historical understanding of the cultures that frame environmental problems.

A guiding principle: anthropogenic climate change is not merely a technological, economic or political problem. It is also a problem of representation, and it demands a new mode of imagining our relationship to the Earth.

Our case studies examine how colonialism reshaped global relations to the environment through extraction, exploitation and dispossession that continuously resurface and condition the limits of modern life. We interrogate the colonial afterlives and geotraumas that produced a gendered and racial hierarchy along the lines of nature and culture — one that relegated women, Indigenous people, non-Europeans and the poor to an objectified figure of nature, while tying the white propertied heterosexual male to rationality, subjectivity and culture.

The project deploys anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, Indigenous and decolonial approaches to environmental policy and field study, to dismantle that hyper-separation of human identity from nature and to centre embodied, lived experience of local geographies.

Scale

Global environmental challenges require attention to micro and macro relations of scale. Our research is multi-scalar, with attention to how the local disrupts disembodied views of the globe, and to how distance can obscure the relationships between sites and subjects thousands of miles apart.

Where some theories of sustainable development assume a universal subject and an apolitical, technical, financialised or managerial solution, our methods investigate the uneven distribution of resources, differential subject positions, and materiality mediated by cultures, histories and epistemologies.

Methods

Our primary methodologies are textual analysis, case studies, ethnography and archival research. Through them we engage with and as members of the communities connected to our sites, and with the material, infrastructural, ecological, geological and more-than-human histories that inform them.

Composite ethnography

Our approach to the OAiS Labs is composite ethnography: a method focusing on collaboration, materiality and multiplicity, and an ethic of provisional construction towards a more habitable world. It emerged from the Speculative Life Research Cluster and the Ethnography Lab at Concordia.

This transdisciplinary and self-reflexive approach foregrounds the role of composition in the craft of ethnography. It offers a way to think about open-ended attunement to emergent objects under what is increasingly called the Anthropocene. We approach the Anthropocene itself as a composite object — an amalgamation of nature and culture that demands a transdisciplinary approach to its distributed effects.

Related to patchwork ethnography and to Tsing's art of noticing, the method makes possible a new form of attention to the particularity of the planetary, and the planetary in the particular.

Reading the archive

Alongside fieldwork, we read literary, visual, cinematic and other cultural archives associated with each site as a framing technique. At several sites the archives are literally shared: colonial forestry records from India sit at Kew; a Kew gardener's Barbados plantation records connect two field intensives across an ocean.

Rewriting

Our methods for the Alter/COP Rewrites draw on the 2020 rewriting of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement at Speculative Life, and on the archive of Aït-Touati and Latour's Théâtre des Négociations. Rewriting has precedent in the legal sphere, in the Feminist Judgments Project, and in the political sphere, in Bolivia's 2009 constitutional rewrite. These offer methods for investigating the possibilities for new ways of representing, mediating and communicating historical governance texts.

Ethics and data

Fieldwork is grounded in community-led protocols for convening with and as members of the local context, aimed at amplifying habitability without inserting new modes of profit-taking into the web of life. Research data is archived at Concordia under the network's Data Management Plan, shared following FAIR principles where appropriate, and following OCAP® principles for anything arising from work with Indigenous and historically vulnerable communities.