As we welcome new people to the FEELed Lab, we want to make space for longer introductions to project team members and research affiliates joining us this year. This profile is on Tom Letcher-Nicholls who is joining the FEELed Lab to work on his PhD thesis about place-based ways of rethinking literary methodology and method.
1.Can you tell us about your work/research?
My PhD project explores how different places – and above all our obligations and relations in and to those places – might shape literary methodology and method. My hope is to respond to calls, as articulated by Chelsea Vowel for example, for non-Indigenous people “to start learning about [their] obligations” (Vowel, 2016).
My research also engages Ursula K. Le Guin’s influential essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and its elaboration by Donna J. Haraway as a “carrier-bag practice of storytelling” (“Otherworldly Conversations,” 160). In her “carrier bag” theory, Le Guin bites her thumb at the “Hero” story that seems to dominate Western culture – a masculinist story about bashing, stabbing, killing, conquering – and looks to gather the seeds of another story that might reshape our engagements with the world.
My hope is thus to develop and apply a “carrier bag” of anti-colonial ecocritical protocols, methodological principles, and methods that will be a model for literary studies, but also extend to other interdisciplinary contexts. It will explore what we bring to research, and what we might need to pick up and learn from in order to form respectful and reciprocal relations to place.
I am incredibly grateful to be supervised by Astrida Neimanis, Allison Hargreaves, and Nikhita Obeegadoo, and my project has been helped immeasurably by Natalie Forssman (who is a part of the access and inclusion project at the FEELed lab!). Vowel, Chelsea. 2016. “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments.” Blog post on âpihtawikosisân: Law. Language. Culture. September 23, 2016.
https://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/.
2.Why did you want to work with the FEELed Lab?
I have been so grateful for the FEELed Lab in my first two years here in the Okanagan. Through the work of the Lab, I have been privileged to experience so much incredible work from so many wonderful people. This has helped me learn about this place, and I have learned so much about feminist, queer, crip and anticolonial perspectives.
The Lab cultivates a warm, kind, and inclusive environment where you can show up as you are. I am so honoured to be a part of it and cannot wait to contribute. (I am also desperate to see the bears in the forest around the lab).
3.Why are expansive engagements with environmental issues important?
I think that this is because environmental issues themselves are so complex and variegated. A big part of my journey up to this point has been learning how and why environmental issues are riven by racism, colonialism, capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, ableism and much more. That’s why we need as many voices, tactics, perspectives, and approaches to tackling these challenges which are so urgent because they are so unequal in culpability and consequence.
Right now the world with all its interlocked crises can feel so heavy, but – as well as being urgent and necessary – I find the expansive engagements with crisis at the FEELed Lab such a source of hope and strength. It’s hopeful, empowering and often joyful to hear about decolonisation, plant science, marine biology, linguistics, disability justice, social work, and so much more in one space.
You can read more about Tom’s work in this FEELed Note reflecting on his experience of presenting at the ALECC 2024 conference.
The FEELed lab 