This FEELed Note is the next update from our SSHRC-funded “Enhancing Access and Inclusion in Environmental Humanities Research Practice” Project.
This project’s intent is to explore access and inclusion as it manifests (or doesn’t) at environmental field research labs – such as the FEELed Lab. As it unfolds, we are also realizing that it’s just as much about resituating and reworking how we understand terms like “access” and “inclusion.”
These insights are mostly emerging through our practice-led, exploratory, site-specific and arts-focused methods. We resist “applying a theory.” We resist the easy pull to defined-in-advance outputs. We are (trying out) taking our time. We digress. We make space to see what arises when we ask difficult questions, and implicate ourselves. (Note-to-reader: this is never easy in the context of institutional space-time-expectation. Part of our experiment is just committing to this approach.)
Following a seminar that Emma attended late last year on the feminist praxis of safety audits, and inspired by idea that the value of such audits is just as much (or more so) about the process as a way of building community, our team decided to conduct a “safety and access audit” at the FEELed Lab.
We pinned a Saturday at the end of January in our calendars (access note: it was impossible to find 3 hrs on a ‘work day’ when we were all available. See above note about institutional space-time-expectation…). We approached this objective loosely. What we really meant by “safety and access audit” was: let’s go and be in a specific place, together and alone, and pay attention to how the theories and concepts we are discussing in our research meetings show up, or don’t, or transform, or complexify.
We began by paying attention to: “How do we get here?” Arriving in a place is part of being in a place. (When does the question of “access” in relation to a place begin?). We collectively organized childcare.
We arrived, drank tea and ate snacks, and turned our working concepts over in our hands to look at them anew: what do we mean by affordance? imagining welcome? safety? responsiveness? preparedness? comfort? We looked at work by Arseli Dokumaci and Mia Mingus. We told stories about our longterm and recent relationships to this place: this Land, this city, this regional park, this “EcoCulture Centre”, this “FEELed Lab.” We discussed storytelling as a way to understand access and inclusion.
We set out on our own to find out more about how our bodies are (or aren’t) held by this place. Fresh snow meant that there were traces of other bodies who are also held by this place. (Hopeful lynx tracks were in fact raccoon…). We wondered: is this place a wilderness, a forest, something called “nature”? If not, does that mean it should be any less cared for? How does the idea of disturbance change how think about places, access and inclusion? How does our disturbance affect a place (and its own needs and desires)? Which bodies are considered “disturbances,” and under what circumstances?
Affordance, safety, responsiveness. (Can a place hold us, and can we hold a place back?)
While Matt, Natalie, Emma and Astrida explored the outdoor space, Jenica spent time exploring the “Lab” itself. Candles. Crock pots. Tea. Plant cuttings germinating. Handmade posters. Slippers by the door. Imagining welcome.
At the end of our time together we composed notes and zines (as always, these processes generated connections between thoughts, ideas and feelings that other methods seem to be less capable of drawing out).
Sometimes a path (or a lift) to access gets stuck in a rut.
Sometimes old-school ideas about wilderness have something new to tell us.
Sometimes a conversation is disturbing… in a generative way.
Sometimes a broken-down bench is a wise teacher.
Sometimes working on a Saturday can still be about community, and adventure.
Why not take the carpool?!
The FEELed lab 