This chapter summarizes the seven theoretical storywork principles outlined in the book: respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. Teachers’ experiences are shared to highlight the implications of these principles for learning and teaching and the importance of imagination and humility. Thinking through how meaning is made with stories, particularly by children, Elder Ellen White, Archibald’s storywork collaborator, states, “you [are] tickling the imagination.” This is, of course, not only applicable to children, for “each and every one of us hunts magical[ly] all the time in our thoughts” (White).

Archibald, J. (2008b). The Power of Stories to Educate the Heart. In Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit (pp. 83–100). UBC press.

How does one learn to hear and tell stories? To listen with and learn from stories? To understand storywork as a power that can actualize emotional healing and promote wellness? Archibald writes in this chapter about her own journey to working towards the answers to these questions. Working from her own Indigenous context Archibald explains, “[i]n Stó:lō and Coast Salish cultures the power of storywork to make meaning derives from a synergy between the story, the context in which the story is used, the way it is told, and how one listens to the story.”

Armstrong, J. (1998). Land Speaking. In S. J. Oritz (Ed.), Speaking for the generations: Native writers on writing (pp. 174–194). University of Arizona Press.

Some language is rooted and persistent in place, changing as the land changes. These are called Indigenous languages. N’silxchn is the language of this place, the Okanagan watershed, Syilx territory. “Voices that move within as my experience of existence do not awaken as words. Instead they move within as the colours, patterns, and movements of a beautiful, kind, Okanagan landscape.” Words in n’silxchn, Armstrong explains, emerge from human parsing of the song the land speaks. “[I]t is their distinctive interaction with a precise geography, which forms the way indigenous language is shaped and subsequently how the world is viewed, approached, and expressed verbally by its speakers.” This essay tells the reader of the reality presented by N’silxchn, “very much like a story…potent with animation and life,” and the ways in which these realities are being articulated also through “Rez English.” Armstrong understands two realities through the two languages she uses, an N’silxchn reality and an English one, and in her writing, works to “construct bridges between the two realities.”

Atkinson, D. (2014). Pedagogy of the Event [Keynote address]. Citeseer. http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/onn_atkinson.pdf

Borrowing the Lacanian concept of the Real (via Zizek), which “relates to something that disrupts our normal frameworks of understanding” or “hints at the gaps in the symbolic,” Atkinson describes “real learning.” Real learning “aris[es] through an event which involves a movement into a new or changed ontological state, … a risky situation in which ontological boundaries become uncertain or fractured.” This conceptualization of learning is communicated as a pedagogical “ethics of the unknown, an ethics of becoming.” These concepts, in conjunction with Badiou’s (2001) ‘that-which-is-not-yet,’ Atkinson formulates a “pedagogy of the event” that “has to try to accommodate learning encounters that precipitate new forms of learning.” In this course, through our attentive Repetition practice, we are interested in this concept as realized through “localised micro-events of learning viewed as local processes of becoming in which learners emerge as subjects.”

Barry, L. (2014). Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor. Drawn & Quarterly.

The book begins with a two-page hand drawn syllabus that includes the phrase “I wuv you” and remains quirky throughout. Barry explains and digresses from three years of syllabi and curriculum development in search of a program that will bring students and instructor alike closer to answering the question “what is an image?” The whole book is drawn in a visually overstimulating collage/comic/sketchbook style unique to Barry and probably a handful of seven-year-olds. In addition to “what is an image?” much of the text is presented to the reader in the form of questions. “How long does it take to draw this many parallel lines?” (72) for example. It’s clear she values repetition, and sees her students learning to value it as well.

Bell, S. J., Instone, L., & Mee, K. J. (2018). Engaged witnessing: Researching with the more-than-human. Area, 50(1), 136–144.

Here the authors explore co-fabricated “methodologies for researching with and writing about the non-human.” Working with the Indigenous Australian method of Dadirri, which includes “being patient and taking the time that is needed” (Brearley, Hamm, Paton, & Rose, 2008, p. 158), the authors co-fabricate research with trees by making and holding time and space and attending with their whole-body sensory apparatus. This is what they call “engaged witnessing,” a practice that “include[s] following the movements and actions of agents; writing in and about the field; repeating actions; attending to the ability of plants and animals to alter human action; taking time; and focusing on all senses.” This is seen as a “response-able practice” – practice that requires and enables a response (Haraway, 2008).

Boscacci, L. (2018). Wit(h)nessing. Environmental Humanities, 10(1), 343–347.

Resplendent with concatenations of all sorts, this short essay meanders around an intersection of bearing witness and standing with. These are moments of “encounter-exchange” between human and other-than-human kin. Here Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytically imbued concept of wit(h)nessing “enriches and extends the work of witnessing by embracing the teachings of affect and more-than-visual sensing and mattering in our humanimal encounters.”

Castleden, H., Morgan, V. S., & Lamb, C. (2012). “I spent the first year drinking tea”: Exploring Canadian university researchers’ perspectives on community-based participatory research involving Indigenous peoples. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 56(2), 160–179.

This is an important paper. It is important to publish work pertaining to the on-the-ground dynamics of research and researchers who aim for relational accountability in their work. Indigenous research, research with Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous research methodologies are at the forefront of changing research ethics for the better. It is not just Indigenous people who deserve and require respect, reciprocity, relevance, responsibility, and attention to and care for relations, both human and other-than-human. The authors here share interview data from a group of researchers selected because of the community based participatory research (CBPR) with Indigenous communities and Land claimed by Canada. They start by stating that the data has been organized using a standard four-stage research model (research design, data collection, analysis, knowledge translation/mobilization), then go on to claim that “Indigenous scholars and non-Indigenous scholar-allies argue that this model is complicit in producing socio-historical circumstances that are undermining Indigenous peoples’ autonomy in Canada despite emerging ethical guidelines.” Here we can see the necessity of and potential for the fifth stage we have been calling “presearch.” This paper highlights the time, budgetary, and institution-procedural constraints that make difficult the operationalization of CBPR, particularly for early career researchers. Though this is a paper about executing a particular methodology under the field-banner of geography, it can be extended outwards to other fields of research, particularly when we consider Land a research partner and facilitator.

Chambers, C. (2008). Where are we? Finding common ground in a curriculum of place. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 6(2).

This paper comes out of Chamber’s reflection on their work with literacies of the Land and the transference of those literacies into everyday community life. They describe a “curriculum of place” that asks and moves toward answering the question: where are we and what is appropriate to do in this place. Signposting this curriculum of place, Chambers enumerates the need for 1) a different sense of time, 2) enskillment, 3) an education of attention, and 4) wayfinding. Through the education of attention and environmentally situated action, skilled practitioners teach this curriculum. These practitioners need not be human to teach humans. “It is where we are that matters,” Chambers writes. “By learning to do what is appropriate in this place, and doing it together, perhaps we can find the common ground necessary to survive.”

Chandler, E., Johnson, M., Gold, B., Rice, C., & Bulmer, A. (2019). Cripistemologies in the city: “Walking-together” as sense-making. Journal of Public Pedagogies: WalkingLab, 4.

Here Eliza Chandler and colleagues explore the activity of walking/traversing environments as methodology employed for coming to understand the landscape and the walker/traverser’s place within in. Through the lens of cripistemologies (McRuer and Johnson, 2014), which identifies “disabled people and disability experiences as the subject positions from which knowledge about disability is generated,” and the figure of the flâneur (Serlin, 2006), who “has always been associated with gleaning a sensorial experience of the urban landscape”, the authors explore two performances by blind theater artist Alex Bulmer, “in which walking, specifically ‘walking-together,’ is embedded as both a performative element and an integral mode of inquiry.”

Donald, D. (2012). Indigenous Métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 533–555. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2011.554449

Indigenous métissage is a research sensibility developed by Dwayne Donald. Here Donald views “existing tensions as potential sources of creativity that encourage complex and transdisciplinary approaches to research.” This sensibility will necessitate deconstruction of “the colonial frontier logics of inside/outside” and “meaningful reconstruction through sustained engagements that traverse perceived civilizational divides.” If this can happen, the stories linking Indigenous peoples and settlers in the Lands claimed by Canada will hold the potential to “revitalize relationships with a common sense of place.”

Jones, C. (2019). That time I punched a boy in the forehead: Sibling stories ahead of research. Disability & Society, 34(4), 657–662.

Chelsea Jones shares a story about sharing a story. In the process of building relationships with new research collaborators, Jones found herself in the midst of an acute act of presearch, sharing a story from her childhood, a “sibling story” that resonated with community members. Understanding the power of sharing and receiving stories is an important aspect of presearch. Stories require the making and holding of time and space to be shared. And making meaning out of stories requires duration and corrugation. Here, Jones shows some of her process, through the making and holding of time and space, in conversation with duration, and in the act of corrugating her own sibling stories, with those of others, and the theories that support her inquiry. It is in this way that storytelling becomes disability activism.

Joseph, A. (2013). Boosman. In The Country of Sen-om-tuse (snʔamtus): Growing Up the Traditional Okanogan Way (Vol. 1, pp. 20–32). Theytus.

The book in which this chapter resides is a memoir, one man’s experience “growing up the traditional Okanogan way.” Andrew Joseph Sr. recounts how he came to live with and be raised by his grandparents Jennie and Saul. Joseph details the sensory training he received, the “training for children’s eyesight and awareness of their surroundings and movement, [which] begins when they are babies.” To begin the story of his training he introduces the method Jennie, who was blind, would use to keep track of him when he was a small child playing outside: “One of my first memories was being outside to play in a harness with a rope tied to my back. … It was easy for her to check on me and find me when she needed to care for me”. While this chapter has been primarily included here because of the detailing of sensory training, this commentary on and normalization of child minding while blind is not to be missed. The following sensory training is described: 1) eyesight and awareness of surroundings and movement; 2) vibrations of sounds and actions; 3) recognition of particular smells; 4) to feel with hands or body whatever you come into contact with; 5) taste, desire, and sharing; 6) imitation of others–“act like your cat stalking a bird, now go get that chicken!”

Kanngieser, A. (2020, November 30). Listening as being-with. The Seed Box. https://theseedbox.se/blog/listening-as-being-with/

In this short essay Kanngieser describes a research foray with hydrophones, in a good fishing spot, where “listening became a belief in being-with.” They describe aural attunement for the reader in a manner too accurate and lovely to paraphrase. “Attunement is an active tuning into. It is active in the sense that it invites a constant dance, sensing and flowing with, noticing and moving together. It is a responsiveness to what is being heard – heard not only as aural hearing. Tuning-into thrives in unhurriedness because listening cannot happen faster than the sound being made. Everything takes the time it takes. What is to come cannot be foretold. Being-with sounds, as they are, without name, as they unfold, is a practice of relation without conditions.”

Kanngieser, A., & Beuret, N. (2017). Refusing the world: Silence, commoning, and the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(2), 363–380.

As suggested by Adriene Rich (1978), silence can be planned and strategic. Here Kanngieser and Beuret detail three ways in which silence operates as refusal, refusal to participate in (neo)colonialism, refusal to consume, and refusal to speak over others. Through a recognition of “the ambivalent nature of silence—as conjunctive absence and presence, excess and lack, activity and passivity,” these silences are co-ordered with acts of commoning. Most immediately applicable to this course material, though no more or less important than their other discursive strands, is the author’s reading of silence to be “understood as a means for becoming attentive to, and making space for, more-than-human forms of life.”

Kanngieser, A., Neilson, B., & Rossiter, N. (2014). What is a research platform? Mapping methods, mobilities and subjectivities. Media, Culture & Society, 36(3), 302–318.

This paper is an inquiry into “collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation.” The authors make an appeal to people conducting research: “methods must contend with the ideological, technological and economic instruments that condition knowledge production at the current conjuncture.” Research, labour, subjectivity, and knowledge are all shaped through context-specific infrastructures, the “hardware settings, software dynamics and the materialities of labour and life.” The media and platforms through which we choose to share data matter. Interactions with said platforms allow varied and variable possibilities to be perceived for interaction with and pursual of further inquiry in a given research assemblage.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2003). Learning to See. In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (pp. 7–13). Oregon State University Press.

This chapter expounds on the potential profundity that comes with committed, repeated encounters, as well as the recognition of our human sensory apparatus as limited in capacity. Kimmerer studies mosses with the intensity, familiarity, and intention of family. The mosses are relations deserving of respect. “Looking at mosses adds a depth and intimacy to knowing the forest. Walking in the woods, and discerning the presence of a species from fifty paces away, just by its color, connects me strongly to the place. That certain green, the way it catches the light, gives away its identity, like recognizing the walk of a friend before you can see their face. Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child’s smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.”

Kimmerer, R. W. (2003). The Standing Stone. In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (pp. 1–6). Oregon State University Press.

In this chapter Kimmerer brings together the themes of walking, duration, change, moss taxonomy, the power of naming and names, and the collaborative nature of habitats in which beings intermingle at various time scales. “The rocks are full of intention, a deep presence attracting life. This is a place of power, vibrating with energy exchanged at a very long wave length. … The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away at their surfaces, grain by grain, bringing them slowly back to sand.”

King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. House of Anansi.

Thomas King’s widely listened to, read, and revisited Massey Lectures from 2003 are compiled here in a book. “The Truth about Stories” is declarative: “Stories are wonderous things… and they are dangerous;” “[t]he truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” The lectures share stories and how stories are shared in a broadly characterized “native” context. They preach listening to and being with stories, and therefore each other, as the powerful force for change. To begin the afterword, King cites Nigerian storyteller Ben Okiri: “If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.”

Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press.

This both is and is not a book about plastic pollution. Liboiron studies plastic pollution, yes, and the book has much to say about both plastic and pollution, however, it mostly speaks to process. Process as in methodology, and process as in colonialism. Upwards of 50% of the text in this book was written as footnotes, a compromise with the publisher, Duke University Press. That is process, anti-linear, activist, process. While carrying many stories and speaking to a strong and logically laid out position on the interpretation of “pollution” as a concept, the central tenant of the book remains clear throughout: Assuming access to stolen Indigenous land for the purpose of ‘disposing’ materials is colonial in attitude and colonial in process. See Media Indigena for an extended conversation about the book between Liboiron and the show’s hosts (Part 1, Part 2).

Lilburn, T. (1999). Living In The World As If It Were Home. Cormorant Books.

In relation with and relating to the deer, poplars, and wild roses of the Moosewood Sandhills, the Quill Lakes, and the South Saskatchewan River, Lilburn explores poetry’s fundamental ecstatic appetite. We can think of this as an appetite for observation, noticing, attention. While “[p]roximity will never be effortless,” a practiced repetition or “discipline” can teach those who attend through the school of the river and instruction of grass. This whole little book is about attending to the kinship networks with whom we as humans do not share words. In lieu of sharing words we can sew the encounters we share between the words of poems, songs, and gestures of attunement.

Maloley, C., & Jones, C. (2018). Accessibility in the Classroom with Dr. Eliza Chandler. https://soundcloud.com/user-305224768-967971769/2-accessibility-in-the-classroom-with-dr-eliza-chandler

Eliza Chandler is an assistant professor at X University (formerly referred to as Ryerson). She teaches in the school of disability studies and engages prolifically with the confluences of art and disability in Candada. Her conversation with Curtis Maloley and Chelsey Jones moves from classroom and pedagogy accessibility practices to how audio media environments might change to both invite disabled participants and creators and how to differently experience communication and interaction through sound and broadcast.

Maloley, C., & Jones, C. (2021). Ungrading with Dr. Ebru Ustundag. https://soundcloud.com/user-305224768-967971769

Hosts Curtis Maloley and Chelsea Jones share a conversation with Ebru Ustundag about their experiences. They talk about the ways in which they have employed ungrading and peer assessment in the past and reflect on the efficacy of those procedures in relation to the students who have helped them understand the principles of ungrading in practice. “I really spend time to cultivate belonging in the class,” Ustundag says, highlighting the need for classroom communities to be safe and nurturing.

Markle, J., & Pelech, S. (2021). Walking: A Quiet Participation in Place. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18(2), 179–191.

Through a series of storied reflections of working, living and walking alongside students the authors reveal the silences at play. Silence, walking, attention, and echos become the stuff of attunement to places of dwelling. Connecting curriculum and literary métissage through the embodied act of walking, the authors explore the notion of walking as quiet participation, which is characterized as a bodily attunement toward human kin and the more-than-human world. This piece may illuminate some ways in which walking can be central to the process of educating attention through human sensory apparatus.

Morgan, V. S. (2014, July 2). Empty Words on Occupied Lands? Positionality, Settler Colonialism, and the Politics of Recognition. Antipode Online. https://antipodeonline.org/2014/07/02/empty-words-on-occupied-lands/

Vanessa Sloan Morgan addresses the politics and implications of a personal situating phrase she had used for years before having it questioned. Settler culture qualifiers can empty positioning statements of the intent and commitment from which they were created. Aiming to open a dialogue, “or at least prompt personal reflection, about the politics, consequences, and purposes behind minute, embodied expressions of colonial resistance (ownership?) in public spaces,” Morgan tentatively shares her experience of having the fullness of her words questioned.

Myers, N. (2017). Ungrid-able ecologies: Decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3(2), 1–24.

This photo essay communicates a series of research notes from two years participating in the project that Meyers and their collaborator Liberona call “Becoming Sensor,” which “mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise.” The photos and accompanying text are presented as “expansive meditations of art and the artful attentions of ethnography to remake the naturalist’s notebook.” Folding movement into photographs presented Meyers asks “What is involved in monitoring an environment? What would it take to really pay attention to what is happening here?” This project, we are told, requires “subtle attunements of our always already synesthetic sensoria,” the linking up, bridging between, and dissolving the boundaries of categorized senses.

Nave, L. (2021). Ethical and Accessible UDL with Ann Gagne (No. 62). https://thinkudl.org/episodes/ethical-and-accessible-udl-with-ann-gagne

Nave and Gagne share a conversation about ableism in the academy and universal design for accessibility. “[A]ccessibility is important to me because ethics is important to me,” explains Gagne. They highlight the difference between accessibility and accommodation, link physical to tech infrastructure in academic space and beyond, and explore the applicability of alt-text to archival practices and information researchers. For those who use twitter, Gagne also provides specific instructions for “how to alt-text your tweet.”

Neimanis, A. (2017). Posthuman Gestationality: Luce Irigaray and Water’s Queer Repetitions. In Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology (pp. 65–107). Bloomsbury Publishing.

In this chapter of her book Bodies of Water Astrida Neimanis expands of a queer reading of Luce Irigaray’s (1991) “most watery text,” Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Neimanis proposes that Irigaray’s bodies of water can help to imagine “an ineradicable alterity that is also sustained and
gestated by an aqueous commonality.” The cyclical re/un/making of bodies of water questions the “potential of watery gestationality within our corporeal selves … we may be gestational as lover, as neighbour, as accidental stranger. We learn gestationality from water; we repeat its potential in and as watery bodies, too.” This articulation is supported by Gille Deleuze’s (1994) Difference and Repetition, in which difference is selected and distributed through repetition, again, always differing from itself. Think of this repetition, the “eternal return…a dissolution of identity and representation and instead is the affirmation of difference” when out for your Attentive Repetition walks, in the same place, again, repeatedly. Think of what differentiation this repetition necessarily facilitates.

O’Neill, S., Raymont, P., & Lang, N. (2018). In the Making: Rebecca Belmore [Documentary]. CBC. https://gem.cbc.ca/media/in-the-making/s02e08

Rebecca Belmore is interviewed in preparation for a retrospective on her life’s work. Belmore has been making profoundly influential art as an Indigenous woman in Canada for decades: “With each of her artworks she transforms simple materials into monumental gestures.” She reflects here on some of the works that have been most important to her, and how her position as an Indigenous woman, someone who deals with racism and injustice directed toward, her self, her communities, and the Land, has been essential to her art.

Phillips, L. G., & Bunda, T. (2018). Beginning stories and storying. In Research through, with and as storying (pp. 1–16). Routledge.

In this opening chapter to their book, Research through, with and as storying, Louise Phillips and Tracey Bunda describe “storying as the act of making and remaking meaning through stories.” In the spirit of storying, they write “not only as a coming together, but also two-gather…our affinity with stories draws us close so that we two-gather to write this text.” The authors extend the concept of storying to the realm of research, as inquiry, theorising, and sharing/presenting research. Storytelling is an accessible, everyday practice that crosses cultures, classes, and ways of being in the world to provide local situated truths and the gifting of new insights.

Pink, S. (2011). Sensory digital photography: Re-thinking ‘moving’ and the image. Visual Studies, 26(1), 4–13.

Images are “produced and consumed as part of the experience of multisensory environments.” Here Sarah Pink interrogates the possibilities that might emerge when intermingling theories of the image and theories of place. The piece deals with interaction of other-than-visual sensory stimuli with ‘the image’ as concept and artifact and how this discussion can go beyond an oft written about rejection of the hierarchy of senses. Interpreting photographs specifically as a “meshwork of moving things,” Pink includes an iconic bull fighting image of a man in fancy dress bowing to a bull. This photo helps her explain that “images are only possible because they are part of the photographer’s movement with the performance, her or his corporeal engagement with it.”

Quist, C. (2021, April 28). Blogs and Growing Pointsettias: An OER Opportunity Made Possible by COVID. Cascadia Open Education Summit 2021. https://cascadia.bccampus.ca/schedule/

In this presentation for the Cascadia Open Education Summit 2021, Christine Quist, who teaches horticulture skills and technologies at Vancouver Island University shares her experience moving a previously in-person lab course into the blogosphere. When teaching had to become a remote affair Quist reformulated a poinsettia growing course that had, in the past, been taught in a campus greenhouse into a distributed experiment. Students were each given a “grow tent” in which they grew poinsettias in their own homes. In order to facilitate learning in community despite the individualized practice, each student recorded their practice and observations on a blog. Subscribing to each other’s blogs was a way for the students to learn from one another while they remained apart. Evidence of community cohesion is brought forward through an example of problematic low humidity solved by one student through the addition of a damp cloth to their grow tent. This technique trickled through the cohort’s blogosphere, indicating that students were following along with the activities of their peers and responding to their individual circumstances accordingly.

Reason, M. (2018). Drawing. In C. Lury, R. Fensham, A. Heller-Nicholas, S. Lammes, A. Last, M. Michael, & E. Uprichard (Eds.), Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods (pp. 47–52). Routledge.

See annotation in Required readings.

Rich, A. C. (1978). Cartographies of silence. In The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W. W. Norton & Company.

This is a love poem. Poems, perhaps especially love poems, stand on their own, no commentary necessary. Here, instead of commentary, let us look specifically at two sets of lines: 1) “Silence can be a plan/ rigorously executed/… Do not confuse it/ with any kind of absence; 2) “what in fact I keep choosing/ are these words, these whispers, these conversations/ from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.” Love and research both need and are composed of words and silence.

Salm, T., & Brogden, L. M. (2021). The Noise of Walking. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18(2), 64–79.

Exploring walking pedagogies for their potential to disrupt ableism, the authors “disorient the norm” (Parrey, 2020) and employ moving as listening. Through photos, poetry, prose, and story, the authors move through landscapes, both physical and conceptual, to “extend an open invitation to the reader, the teacher, the scholar and the walkers to attend to the noise.”

Shannon, D. B. (2019). ‘What could be Feminist about Sound Studies?’: (In)Audibility in Young Children’s Soundwalking. Journal of Public Pedagogies: WalkingLab, 4.

In this essay Shannon draws together examples of four soundwalking methods (soundwalks, listening walks, phonographic walks, and audio walks) asking the question “What would a feminist sound studies listen to or for, when marginalization and oppression are achieved in part through making populations inaudible?” The goal of this inquiry is to understand through composition, how soundwalking can pay attention to what a feminist sound studies might listen to, for, and with. Exploring the sonic features that constitute a landscape can de-centre the visual as a primary way of engaging with the world, however “uncritically turning to sound rather than vision will not, in and of itself, do anything” to move phenomenological engagement with surrounding environments in a more feminist direction.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3).

Simpson starts off with a story, about the sugar bush that highlights Nishnaabeg values of love, compassion, and understanding. The story, which serves as a theoretical anchor, and Simpson’s subsequent analysis highlight the importance of both the individual and collective generation of meaning through encounter, story, and attention. We will employ these two modes, the individual and the collective through our Attentive Repetition practice and classroom work respectively. In her process of coming to know Kwezens, the opening story’s main character, she “learned both from the land and with the land. She learned what it felt like to be recognized, seen and appreciated by her community.”

Styres, S. D. (2011). Land as first teacher: A philosophical journeying. Reflective Practice, 12(6), 717–731.

In this essay composed of “prefatory philosophical journeying” Sandra Styres explores her pedagogical techniques and decisions in relation to the concept of Land as first teacher. “Land as first teacher is an Indigenous philosophy derived out of a land-centred culture that is based on very old pedagogies.” Positioning themself within a circular epistemology derived from a storied worldview Styres asserts, “it is essential to consistently and reflexively ground and relate everything back to the land.” This course has been constructed on this same principle. Reading this reflective essay will be helpful as a touch-point through which to understand the priorities of this curriculum.

TallBear, K. (2015). An indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 230–235.

TallBear, from her standpoint in 2014 (the time of writing), “see[s] but one circuitous path through multiple intellectual cultures and communities to arrive at a place where the line between human and nonhuman becomes nonsensical.” It is at these complex intersections that her work dwells, “under the label “queer (in)humanisms.” In this paper she retraces some of her intellectual steps, bringing together reflections on almost a decade of research inquiry into human genome science and scientists and the red stone of a place currently called “Pipestone National Monument:” “Just like indigenous people who insist on their continuing survival and involvement with their DNA, indigenous quarriers and carvers, medicine people, and everyday people who pray insist on living with the red stone daily. And they make decisions — some of them seen as compromised — about how to best work with the vibrant objects of their attention.” Her concluding interest here is in how Indigenous stories speak of social relations with non-humans. First and foremost, “indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives.”

TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), 17.

In this essay, Kim TallBear discusses her approach to in-concert inquiry with the communities with whom she does research and work. TallBear describes ethics of accountability in research through the compound question “whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?” Resonant with TeallBear’s approach is Bhan’s (2014) practice of and commitment to “continuous and multiple engagements with communities and sites of research.” TallBear articulates her approach to “stand with” as opposed to giving back, and walks the reader through her own journey of figuring research relationships in which she could be invested and that would be simultaneously in line with her own goals and values and those of her collaborators.

Tsing, A. (2010). Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom. Manoa, 22(2), 191–203.

Articulating research as an everyday and everyone practice, with curiosity only as the prerequisite and fuel, Tsing asks and answers the question: “How do lovers of fungi practice arts of inclusion that call to others?” As shown in this series of vignettes, vernacular science grounded in multispecies love, in this case between humans and matsutake mushrooms, “encourages learnedness in natural science along with all the tools of the humanities and the arts.” Perhaps the world’s matsutake-curious will even make a successful “appeal to matsutake to help us build models of well-being in which humans and nonhumans alike might thrive.”

van Dooren, T. (2020). Story(telling). Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ), 7.

Thom van Dooren describes and reflects on the pedagogy and practice of his storytelling mentor, Deborah Bird Rose. Under Rose’s tutalage, van Dooren has come to think of storying as an ethic, “a way of doing the world.” Responsible thinking, van Dooren writes, “is inseparable from storytelling, inescapably caught up in the particular.”

Varela, F. J. (1999). The second lecture: On Ethical Expertise. In Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition (pp. 23–41). Stanford University Press. https://cepa.info/2119

Here Varela highlights the distinction between skilled un-thought behavior and conscious action. Relying heavily on Mencius’s articulation of Confucian ethics, moving briefly to the Buddhist concepts of non-duality and non-unitary self, and finding himself in the realm of cognitive science, where “even the more conservative viewpoints in the field… deny the existence of a solid, centralized, unitary self.” Of particular interest are the articulation of ethics and extension. Ethics: “we acquire our ethical behavior in much the same way we acquire all other modes of behavior: they become transparent to us as we grow up in society. This is because learning as we know it is circular: we learn what we are supposed to be in order to be accepted as learners.” Extension: “According to Mencius, people actualize virtue when they learn to extend knowledge and feelings from situations in which particular action is considered correct to analogous situations in which the correct action is unclear.”

Wolfe, C., & Whiteman, M. (2016). Landscape and Inscription. Environmental Humanities, 8(1), 143–148.

A video installation, Mountain Pine Beetle, shows landscape as a site of inscription of forces. The geological, economic, and geopolitical forces of the mountain pine beetle’s impact “operate both above and below human scales of perception and interaction with the landscape.” The authors discuss the affective and resonant experiences evoked by the instillation, processing the communication potential of the medium.

Yos, I., & Soundcamp. (2020). Good Morning World. [Video]. https://rachelsale.co.uk/Good-Morning-World

This soundscape film was made in response to a 24 hour radio broadcast that relayed hundreds of audio livestreams from around the world for International Dawn Chorus Day 2020. Each livestream recorded the sound of the dawn chorus as it occurred in real time. Yos composed and juxtaposed colorful gradients layered with precise markings and integrated with geographic features of the consecutive dawning locations.