GLEANING URBAN SHORELINES
Vancouver is a settler colonial city occupying the unceded and ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Urban development since the 1800s has reshaped the contours of land and water, filling in much of the local tidal flats and paving over many streams. Today, streets and alleyways extend like asphalt riverbeds along whose shorelines the waste of human excess accumulates for disposal. Discarded matters evince spectacular consumption. Crows feast on the overflow of human acquisitiveness. Garbage is composition awaiting compaction.

site 1 In the above image, garbage overflows from two green commercial dumpsters. Spilling from torn bags, various containers and food waste litter the asphalt as crows perch amid the detritus. The photograph was captured by the author in alleyway in the West End of Vancouver on a Christmas Day walk, 2023. The below audio recordings below were taken in May 2022. Edit to the second recording: Bombus impatiens is not Quinn's favorite bee but a favored bee of study.

Not only municipal waste defies containment. Residential alleyways, curbsides and road verges are porous boundaries where belonging is in flux. Operating on urban denizens’ tacit knowledge of the city By "urban denizens tacit knowledge of the city" I mean practical knowledge of the way things work; a box of odds and ends put out on the curb or the edge of a lawn means passersby are welcome to take what they want. Though this could be considered a gift economy, it's also entwined with consumer excess (once found a giant TV with a note: santa brought a bigger one). Free boxes become sites where use and value are refigured because maybe I take a stapler for an art installation rather than to bundle loose pages.
x , matters deemed no longer fit for manufactured purpose are offered up as open-ended invitations for recirculation by passersby. Half my wardrobe I gleaned from cardboard boxes left on the sidewalk or by back-alley dumpsters, pinned to trees or tossed over fences. A fleece vest, vintage dress, quarter zip, blue jeans, sweatpants, and sneakers to name but a few things. Items found while walking the city now collaborators in my everyday research and writing practices include a coffee mug, backpack, stapler, office desk, and Epson WorkForce Pro 4740 printer found with a note reading: I STILL WORK.

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site 2 a small selection of gleaned items now part of my wardrobe and thinking/making practices

Urban shorelines prove sites of leaky disposal where use and value are rendered differently intelligible by human and more-than-human scavengers. Like the crows, I poach matter and meaning from what I find around, performing bricolage with the physical-conceptual field of my encounter. Oftentimes I don't take or make use of anything more than what I need in the moment: a chair to sit in while on a call; an electrical socket in which to plug my phone while I talk.

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site 3 On a walk the other day I went to show an interlocutor the spot where I plugged my phone in during a therapy call two years ago, only to find it had been covered over. The fence around the apartment building's entryway, which the socket sat just outside of, had also been reinforced with metal meshwork. So much for poaching power here.

The decadence of disposal is ripe with contamination. Graffiti transforms commercial dumpsters, newspaper boxes, utility boxes, street signs, and the sides of vacant storefronts into sites of discordant discourses.

site 4 A municipal electrical box is covered in colorful graffiti.

I find their drift (see 'find the drift' in in negative-spaces/rhythmanalysis.html) across the city. Some tags prefer specific surfaces whereas others (like the tag 'below') are scrawled big and small everywhere from UBC campus to downtown to East Vancouver. In a chapter for The Routledge Urban Design Research Methods, Konstantinos Avramidis (2023) explores the "material sophistication and site-specificity" (304) of graffiti, arguing that "Whether explicitly political in content or intention, graffiti acts as a critique on the surface it occupies" (306). The 'signs of protest' rhythm of in negative-spaces/rhythmanalysis.html discusses this further through attention to '15 Minute City Ready' stickers which I noticed proliferating across pedestrian and bikeway infrastructure last winter. Not only are drawing, scratching, and surface marking characteristic of graffiti, Sabina Andron (2016) reveals its etymological background "contains both drawing and scratching within the same concept, designating an action done on a surface and one done to a surface at the same time" (86-87, emphasis in original). Andron states: "graffiti is therefore text and image at the same time, and so are many of the signs encountered on the surfaces of our cities" (2016, 76). Graffiti sites are not static; they are interacted with, covered up, and drawn over...

site 5 On a walk to the grocers last month as I was contemplating how to narrate this page when I encountered something new: An Economy Is A Soul/Spirit/Love.
Yesterday I passed this site again. The graffiti proposing an economy as a soul/spirit/love had been circled and written over with a black and orange crayon, rendering illegible all but love.

UNRULY MATERIAL-SEMIOTICS
A year and a half ago I sat with a group of economic geographers at Koerner's, a pub five minute's walk from our department. My interlocutor who studies economic geography and the political economy of land asked me if and how I saw myself participating in the economy whilst deep mapping. Never having considered this, I responded, "Not really… well, maybe when I buy something?" "Read Priti and Emily's paper From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn't we all be writing economies?" she told me, "It's everything."

Priti Narayan and Emily Rosenman (2022) unsettle notions of expertise located in the academic, urging a reorientation to writing economic geography that recognizes how "knowledge production about the economy is already embedded in the economy itself… " (393). They problematize how knowledge is made legible as 'economic' within academia. What counts as economic geography is often what is written and cited by already established economic geographers, "as if economics is not about how we, we all, live in the everyday" (Narayan and Rosenman 2022, 399, emphasis in original). Though I am not situated within the subdiscipline of economic geography, as graduate student researcher, I have found myself embedded in economies of academic knowledge production, not to mention academic reproduction (see Bauder 2006). This realization led me to consider how and why it matters that I intentionally think and write about geographic knowledge production through everyday spatial practices, and do so in material and semiotic dialogue with the physical-conceptual field of my encounter. How does my participation (as both academic and urban inhabitant) in unruly material and semiotic flows interfere with regulated forms of exchange from within the dominant system?

With this page, I describe how my tactics of practice interfere with hegemonic economies of knowledge production and academic reproduction in ways that matter. My reference to hegemonic economies of re/production is specific to the formal requirements of institutional publishing that render research outputs legible as objects of knowledge, and, the boundary making practices by which field and researcher are rendered differentially articulate. In negative-spaces/rendering.html, I will further elaborate how both my interference practice and the effects of my interference practice at once articulate and refigure such boundaries. For now, I demonstrate the ways in which my everyday practices operate as both sites and tactics for re/producing an alternative academia.

TACTICS: TAKE AND MAKE DO

COMPOSING THE FIELDSITE
As discussed in negative-spaces/interference.html, field and researcher (including instruments of investigation) are provisional configurations whose intelligibility is the effect of iterative 'intra-actions' (Barad 2007) within and as part of specific phenomena. 'The field' itself might be better understood as a phenomenon wherein which fieldsite becomes intelligible as a bounded area/place/extent/scope in dynamic relation to what is framed as researcher and instruments of investigation. The boundary between agencies of observation (instruments and researcher, whose human-ness is itself the effect of boundary making practices) and object of observation (the research fieldsite) is re/figured through boundary making practices which site/cite encounters. Encounters are phenomena, and "phenomena are the effect of boundary-drawing practices that make some identities or attributes intelligible (determinate) to the exclusion of others" (Barad 2007, 208). For example, by site-ing the graffiti of 'an economy' (see site 5) with my phone's camera, I cropped all geographic context out of sight. By embedding the image here as reference, I privilege a visual which cannot entirely be translated to words. The transmission of a photograph from my phone to my computer and this website is made possible through numerous technologies, operations, and histories entirely elided from the scene. Further, a site, as part of the world rendered provisionally determinate, is itself a phenomenon within which empirical formations like 'data' (also phenomena) become differentially intelligible. Sites refigure. Data transmutes. Alleyways meander. A pair of sneakers moves from the fence post to the lid of a neighboring recycle bin. A metal chair with cerulean upholstery migrates down the alleyway before winding up in someone else's garage. I take an espresso maker found on the road verge back to my house where it sits under the stairs, in my room, in my car, until months later, a friend uses it and I feel like I can let it go. Hours after I set it back in the alleyway it's gone.

site 6 No repeat is the same, yet every similarity is accompanied by difference.

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No repeating is the same, yet each similarity is accompanied by difference.

Since researcher and fieldsite are dynamically figured and refigured by different agential cuts, what instruments of investigation will become (useful) cannot be determined beforehand. The "researcher-as-bricoleur" is therefore "equipped with a set of tools rather than a fit-for-purpose methodological strategy" (Roberts 2018a, 54). The bricoleur-as-researcher, to swap Robert's figure to suit myself, is not unlike the transdisciplinary rhythmanalyst who employs the instruments of various fields without committing himself to any one of them (Lefebvre 2013, 94). Deep mapping is about cultivating a toolset and learning how to apply different tools as needed. (This is also what being ADHD is about.) Therefore, rather than commit to a single methodological strategy, deep mapping makes use of tactics. Tactics can be thought of as methods whose validity is measured by their applicability to the situation at hand (Roberts 2018b). In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau describes everyday practices such as talking, reading, and moving about as tactical, "ways of operating" the Greeks called mētis (xix). De Certeau describe the tactics of everyday practices as opportunistic; appropriating the hegemonic system from within, such "surreptitious creativities" form a "proliferating illegitimacy" that resists the authority that seeks their administration or suppression (1984, 96). Tactics poach the dominant system from within while eluding its discipline. James Scott (1998) elaborates mētis as practical knowledge. In contrast to epistemologies that are abstract, general, and universal, practical knowledge is experiential, situated, and local (Scott 1998). Different theories apply in different circumstances (tactics) and understanding of what to use when and where requires familiarity with the field (practical knowledge). Tactics deploy practical knowledge.

TACTICS OF PRACTICE
In what follows I offer some examples of applying tactics in practice. Over the summer an acquaintance asked if I would print my artwork on a tote bag for her. Looking into numerous custom printing websites, it seemed that with the complexity of my designs and color palette, a single bag would cost near eighty dollars. Unsure what to do, I then remembered seeing blank canvas tote bags for sale at a nearby craft store. I also remembered that as a kid, my baba (Turkish for 'father') had helped me print my drawings of dinosaurs onto transfer paper which I'd then ironed onto T-shirts. I thought, why not print my own tote bags? I soon began experimenting with clothing, printing my artwork on T-shirts that were gifted to me or, in most cases, articles I scavenged from the fabric recycling dumpster in the basement of my building.

site 7 An example of my clothing and tote-bag prints, featuring my own artwork.

I printed my designs using the printer I gleaned from the alleyway, and appropriated part of a research grant awarded for materials to buy transfer paper and printer ink. I require hard copies of texts to read. My printer is therefore not an indulgent accessory but an interlocutor in knowledge production. I also used grant money for yarn and crochet hooks because handwork helps me regulate my emotions and also focus while attending lectures. I made a blanket, hats, doilies, and two vests. While I gleaned patterns from Youtube, I had already learned knitting and crocheting in elementary school.

site 8 Two vests I made. The first is brown and green (like chocolate mint chip) and the second, which is unfinished, is baby blue and bubblegum pink. I learned how to crochet a vest from a Youtube video by Cherilyn Q (Cherilyn Q 2023).

These crafting capers may seem like hobbies and expenditures unrelated to research. However, making arts and crafts helps me modulate my attention so that I can think, write, and to show up in all the ways required of me by my university program. In this sense, I invoke the creative humanities by "making as/through thinking and thinking as/through making" (van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 2) in diverse yet interconnected manners.

site 9 Over white paint, which presumably covers up prior graffiti, the statement TAKE AND MAKE is written in uppercase letters. I encountered this site in the alleyway beside Faculty Brewing, my favorite microbrewery in my old neighborhood of Mount Pleasant.

In both field research and website creation, I employ 'spatial bricolage' — the poetics of making do with what tools, skills, and materials are readily available (Roberts 2018b). I take and make do with what has been disposed of, discarded, and/or freely given. Additionally, I appropriate tools, skills, and resources garnered through formal means for alternate purposes. Gleaning is the related practice of gathering information or materials from one's surroundings. Les Roberts refers to "gleaning as a spatial praxis" (Roberts 2018a, 57). Elsewhere, he writes, Whatever is found in whatever landscape the gleaner-bricoleur happens to find herself at whatever time she happens to be there is potentially constituent matter of an assemblage-in-progress, the production of which may take a number of different forms (or none at all—the practice of gleaning-bricolage need not cede an 'output' for it to still count as gleaning and/or bricolage). (Roberts 2018b, 6)

site 10 A voice recording I took midway through my project, while still figuring out what my output might be:

At the time I decided to build a website to convey my master's research, I had only a limited understanding of what such a construction would entail. Instead of learning everything about coding and styling webpages before beginning, I teach myself what I need to know as I go, gleaning (copypasting) snippets of open source code (as is custom) that are relevant to what I am attempting in the moment. Though an internal coherence in terms of styling emerged over time, each page of negative-spaces contains elements designed specifically for the content at hand. For instance, my negative-spaces/rhythmanalysis.html rhythm on balconies contains numerous images. In order to display them neatly, I learned how to make image grids from W3Schools web tutorials ("How To Create an Image Grid" 2023). Indeed, I learned how to construct and style everything visible and interactable in this website from W3Schools and the Q&A platform Stack Exchange. When constructing the .html documents which constitute the eight pages of my thesis, I even glean from myself, copypasting fragments of form from one page to perform a similar function on another.

In making negative-spaces, I also glean practical knowledge developed through teaching, practicing, and consulting on Cartesian cartography and geographic information systems (GIS). For example, I learned to use git and Github — the version control software and internet hosting platform I use to track and render publicly visible my thesis process — through my job at UBC Library's Research Commons where I develop and lead workshops on GIS, as well as provide one-on-one consultations. In consults, I am often required to troubleshoot technical workflows. This requires not that I know everything beforehand, but that I know how to find information relevant to the question at hand. Whether giving GIS consults, working as a cartography Teaching Assistant, or making reference maps for scholarly publications, I exercise computational thinking. This is a skill I learned through a programming course for GIS I took as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Computational thinking is a problem solving technique that was taught to me by Dr. Forrest Bowlick as follows: decomposition → pattern recognition → abstraction → algorithm. (Abstraction and pattern recognition can be in alternate positions.) The point is to approach a problem by deconstructing it into component parts, recognizing similarities and connections, identifying and representing the gist of what needs to be done, and creating a plan to do it. I use computational thinking in the iterative formation of negative-spaces to tackle tasks like transcribing voice recordings, scanning books, and organizing the physical copies of all my literature. The algorithms, or workflows, I’ve developed on an as-needed basis have become tactics singular to my process of creation.

Much of the labor involved in constructing a page, then, is sifting through tremendous amounts of data. There are hundreds of audio recordings on an old Olympus voice recorder originally bought in 2009 to record fiddle tunes learned by ear each summer at Maine Fiddle Camp. (Those recordings are still on the recorder; even though I have multiple backups I can't seem to bring myself to delete them.) There are over a dozen field note journals, as well as notes in and around the margins of books and printed-out articles. There are thousands of photographs and audiovisuals taken in the past three years, only a fraction of which are included in my output. My thesis, aka the webbed site negative-spaces, aka this digital space and its constitutive files, is the effect of spatial and temporal bricolage. It is an assemblage of multimedia made for multiple occasions. Writing from my first winter in the program supplements writing from my third. I hear an audio recording I forgot I made at just the right moment for an idea to take shape. The process of writing each page involves stitching together writings, photographs, recordings, sketches, and notes across various times and contexts. I attend to patterns of resonance as I suture concepts and multimedia, recognizing that the topology I produce is one of an infinity of infinite possibilities. Often, I draw from material I wrote a year or more ago, or material written in the name of another project. This page, for instance, is constituted in part by efforts towards three different conference presentations. Writing abstracts relevant to sections of my thesis is a tactic I use to keep me excited and motivated to write my thesis. Through this 'guileful ruse' (de Certeau 1984, 37), I generate material I then poach for negative-spaces.

WRITING INTERFERENCE, WRITING ECONOMIES
"Publishing in large volumes and in highly-rated journals" is an important facet of academic reproduction (Bauder 2006, 672). The launch of the journal GeoHumanities by the American Association of Geographers in 2015 provided a disciplinarily intelligible platform for publishing work integrating geo-/spatial pursuits with the creative humanities. The introductory article to the second issue of the first volume engaged (the work of) six scholars and creative practitioners around the question, 'What Might GeoHumanities Do?' (Hawkins et al. 2015). They write: "Looking across the [issue] contributions we see publics as collaborators, as knowledge producers, and as constituencies who incite the production of knowledge" (Hawkins et al. 2015, 215). Hawkins et al. (2015) believe the possibilities opened up by practicing GeoHumanities to be "…radical because what is developed in the course of such work is not just new knowledge, but a set of reflections that take aim at the practices and processes of knowledge production themselves" (216). By interfering with hegemonic practices and processes of knowledge production, my tactics of (deep mapping) practice and my website-as-thesis exemplify what GeoHumanities might do: GeoHumanities…do not just require us to move beyond disciplinary silos; they also unsettle relations among theory, praxis, scholarship, practice, and application and undo the privilege of academic expertise. (Hawkins et al. 2015, 216)

site 11 marked up page from Hawkins, Harriet, Lou Cabeen, Felicity Callard, Noel Castree, Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, Hugh Munro Neely, and Peta Mitchell. 2015. “What Might GeoHumanities Do? Possibilities, Practices, Publics, and Politics.” GeoHumanities 1 (2): 211–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1108992.

While my thesis does perform all these functions, negative-spaces is not merely a set of reflections but a diffraction pattern marking the effects of an interference practice. The question driving my experimentation forwards is: What could it mean to think with place? To feel the city? While GeoHumanities sees publics as collaborators who both produce knowledge and incite its production, what about places? Before I encountered 'agential realism' (see Barad 2007) I had begun to consider citing the city as co-author, an impulse which matured into assuming the field of encounter as interlocutor. In their article 'Place Dialogue', Adams and Kotus (2022) argue "communications also relate to places as interlocutors, involving places as more-than-human agents" (2, emphasis in original). However, though they cite three place-based vignettes to elaborate their claim that "place speaks" and has "things to say and do", their article acknowledgements and references recognize only human interlocutors. Moreover, their Data Availability Statement claims "no new data were created or analyzed in this study" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 11). In reproducing citational norms, their article reinscribes "conventional humanist qualitative methodological concepts" (St. Pierre 2018, 606) rather than putting their theory into practice by refiguring who and what gets to count as 'interlocutor' and 'data' within the phenomenon of an academic work. This disconnect is not entirely on the authors. In line with publishing convention, if the authors were to indicate new data were created, they would likely need to make it freely available or else justify their decision not to. In either case, that data created would have to be articulated, and in a manner legible to the publishers. Though publishers may be sympathetic to the theories of a text, they do not necessarily maintain a similar fidelity to praxis. It is understandable, then, that an easier route to getting published would be to report no new data created or analyzed.

The cover image of A Different Kind of Ethnography (Elliott and Culhane 2017), referenced in negative-spaces/interference.html, offers another example of this disconnect. The front cover depicts a fresco covering the side of a building. It is a giant face with wide eyes and a finger held to pursed lips. The back cover credits "Artwork: Jef Aérosol, Chuuuttt!!!, Paris, 2011." Graffiti, clearly visible at the base of the intelligible "artwork", goes unrecognized. In an interview, Jef Aérosol shares that the message of his self-portrait is not to remain silent but to: "...listen to each other, listen to the urban symphony, the melody of the city, perceive the beat of the heart of the capital, the pulse of Paris" ("Interview de Jef Aérosol Pour Son Autoportrait Chuuuttt à Beaubourg" 2019). This is the practice of the rhythmanalyst: "He is always ‘listening out’, but he does not only hear words, discourses, noises and sounds; he is capable of listening to a house, a street, a town as one listens to a symphony, an opera" (Lefebvre 2013, 94). For Aérosol, "What makes a “work” and gives all its meaning to the image is its adequacy to the context, whether architectural, historical, cultural, social or political. The interaction between the environment, passers-by and the very nature of the space constitutes the essence of the work" (“Interview de Jef Aérosol Pour Son Autoportrait Chuuuttt à Beaubourg” 2019). What I found interesting was that the photograph, attributed on the back cover of A Different Kind of Ethnography to "EQRoy/Shutterstock.com", is a stock photo. Nowhere in the book is Chuuuttt!!! referenced. This is particularly disappointing given co-editor Denielle Elliott contributes a chapter whose opening image is a photograph of "mural and graffiti" she took herself in Paris in 2013. Eric Huybrechts, who uploaded another picture of Chuuuttt!!! to the image sharing platform Flickr, writes: "The district inhabitants commissioned the stencil graffiti to replace the unauthorized and unsightly tags that used to smear the wall and depreciated Saint-Phalle and Tinguely’s fountain" (2013). (Saint-Phalle and Tinguely’s sculptures form the Stravinsky Fountain, created in 1983 as part of a series of contemporary sculptures funded by the city (“Stravinsky Fountain” 2024)). I could not find another source to corroborate the impetus for the original commission, but learned from the interview that Aérosol renovated the mural in 2018 due to wear and tear as well as the accumulation of graffiti tags at its base; moreover, he did so on his own dime, as neither the city district nor original sponsor would fund the project (“Interview de Jef Aérosol Pour Son Autoportrait Chuuuttt à Beaubourg” 2019). In one if not both events, graffiti is construed as undesirable in comparison to the administratively authorized artwork by a recognized French artist. What is different between Aérosol restoring his prior artwork unsponsored and the graffiti creeping up from below? The difference is that Aérosol is an intelligible author to the administration who simultaneously renders graffiti undesirable, unsightly, and unauthorized. Thus, even after the original commission, Aérosol retains the author/ity to paint over the artwork of others so as to reinscribe his own. While context is an important component of an artwork for Aérosol, the context of the cover image is absent in A Different Kind of Ethnography.

Citation is a form of address, a formal acknowledgement of an other within the written conversation of an academic text. Citational conventions formalize academic relationships into configurations legible to publishers. Under academic capitalism, citation counts become not only a metric of success but a precondition of that legibility (see Paasi 2005). Citation thus plays an important role in the re/production and dissemination of academic knowledge. Just like we learn how to relate to colleagues and build professional networks, we learn how (and for what purposes) to cite each other. This habituation is discussed by Mott and Cockayne (2017), who call for conscientious engagement in citation as a performative practice for resisting "hegemonies of knowledge production and authority" within the neoliberal university that reify white, cisgendered, heteromasculinist narratives (959). They argue, "Resistance to the hegemony of the citational milieu requires a challenge to the authority of the author as constituted by the reproduction of only a certain set of citational conventions" (Mott and Cockayne 2017, 966). One way to challenge the authority of the author is to value a style of connected thinking and writing that troubles the predictable academic isolation of consecrated authors by gathering and explicitly valorizing the collective webs one thinks with, rather than using the thinking of others as a mere 'background' against which to foreground one's own. (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 202, emphasis in original) When disciplinary and citational conventions are oriented towards identifying and acknowledging human collaborators/constituencies, something like the drift of a graffiti tag/sticker or an alleyway navigation remains unintelligible as interlocutor or data. Sabina Andron (2016) conducts 'wall interviews' as methodological exercise for exploring 'hybrid surface inscriptions' — the juxtaposition/accumulation of sanctioned surface marks and unruly ones. Instead of framing graffiti and authorized signage as separate utterances, "Hybrid inscriptions are a sum of their media, message, linguistic and visual codes, as well as of the territories they belong to and the visual context that surrounds them" (Andron 2016, 81). Annotated images throughout her article mark wall interviews she conducted in London between 2012–2015. Like graffiti, my notes and highlights in hard-copy readings are tactics for "proliferating illegitimacy" (de Certeau 1984, 96) amid sanctioned print. By transforming the pages of my readings into hybrid surface inscriptions which I then scan and embed into my thesis, I challenge the authority of academic publishing to determine what materials get included in the body of my research output. Since my reading involves practicing what could be called 'academic graffiti', I am attuned to thinking with graffiti and hybrid surface inscriptions I notice around me in the city. I have done my best to signal these throughout negative-spaces in anecdotes, demarcated vignettes (see sites 1–12), and in-text references. By citing hybrid surface inscriptions from the physical-conceptual field of my encounter, I participate in unruly flows of material-semiotics. I challenge citational conventions that consecrate the authority of human authors, and, in so doing, I enact interference with hegemonic forms of academic knowledge re/production.

THEORY AS PRAXIS: THINKING WITH POSTHUMAN PUBLICS
The field is not a site separate from the desk at which I produce geographic knowledge or the printer with which I render spatial research. The tools, techniques, tactics, and practices I use to investigate the world I am part of are themselves part of creating the world of my investigation. As Murris and Bozalek (2019) state: "A diffractive methodology contests the notion that a researcher can be taught tools or techniques about a world which is independent of and at an ontological distance from the researcher" (1505). Thinking with something/where/one is also to think with the boundary making practices by which one's object of investigation is provisionally configured/rendered intelligible. As Barad (2007) concludes, "Knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement" (342) "(i.e., the full set of practices) that is a part of the phenomenon investigated or produced" (390). My tactics of interference are not at an onto-epistemological distance from the knowledge they produce (theory of deep mapping) but rather configure the collective webs and compose the fieldsites I think with. In other words, my tactics of deep mapping constitute my theory of deep mapping.

A lingering question for me: who is the public? When I say "render spatial research public", I am referring to creating an artifact that somehow documents my research which I can then make accessible to academics and non-academics alike. This sharing/dissemination is made possible through publication, though that publication is not specific to any one format or platform. Both a 'public Geohumanities' (Hawkins et al. 2015) and a 'public economic geography' (Narayan and Rosenman 2022) position 'publics' as non-intellectuals/academics/researchers. But for all the above, public remains a subset of human population. By whom and of whom are publics made? What are the boundary making practices through which publics are constituted as collaborators in the first place? Barad's posthuman performativity (2003, 2007) extends Foucault and Butler's analyses on the materialization of bodies by attending to how matter itself comes to matter, and to the apparatuses through which human and nonhuman bodies are differentially constituted. Writes Barad, "In an agential realist account, performativity is understood not as iterative citationality (Butler) but as iterative intra-activity" (2007, 184, emphasis in original). If agential realism figures posthuman publics (see negative-spaces/interference.html#thinking-with), new ways of referencing/acknowledging thinking with intellecting others and the practice through which intellecting others are constituted as such are required. In negative-spaces/rendering.html#sitation, I propose sitation as an alternative boundary drawing practice to citation, one which recognizes encounters as phenomena wherein fieldsite and researcher (equipped with tactics of investigation) intra-actively mark one another. Sitation assumes agencies and object of investigation to be provisional configurations where encounter's formal acknowledgement within an academic work renders intra-locutors differentially determinate. Whereas citation cites interaction, sitation sites intra-action. Sitation offers a way of "explicitly valorizing the collective webs one thinks with" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 202).

Rosenman and Narayan (2022) argue that reimagining the subdiscipline of economic geography for a 'public economic geography' would entail "serious consideration of authorship, audience, citations, methods, modes and targets of publication…beyond academic categories and methods employed so far" (401). They emphasize that "Praxis cannot be located in simply the study of economy, or in proposing alternatives, but in actually enacting writing and knowledge production differently, bearing in mind its material and political consequences" (Narayan and Rosenman 2022, 400, emphasis in original).

site 12 Scroll over marked-up reading of passages from Narayan, Priti, and Emily Rosenman. 2022. “From Crisis to the Everyday: Shouldn’t We All Be Writing Economies?” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54 (2): 392–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211068048.

I am not arguing that deep mapping is necessarily productive of a public economic geography but rather suggesting that public geography of any kind extend to posthuman publics and the boundary drawing practices by which researcher, participant, data, and field/site are constituted. Or maybe that is precisely the point — that an economy is not limited, as I once believed, to the production and consumption of goods and services, but also encompasses everyday practices of inhabitation. If economics is about how we all live in the everyday (Narayan and Rosenman 2022), then deep mapping is indeed a performative practice for enacting 'diverse economies' (Gibson-Graham 2008). My deep mapping practice at once interferes with hegemonic economies by poaching skills/materials/resources from the dominant capitalist system, and enacts/forges an alter-economy of distributed knowledge production through siting surreptitious configurations of intra-locutors within and as part of a posthuman public.