Questions driving the experimentation of my MA research-creation forward:
What could it mean to think with place? To feel the city?
How might my tactics of practice be employed to subvert and interfere with hegemonies of knowledge production from within the neoliberal university at the graduate level?
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?
How might knowledge generated through everyday spatial practices be rendered without being flattened, georeferenced, or vectorized? In other words, how might the effect of interferences be marked while accounting for the apparatus of their production?
Questions articulated in the course of my MA research-creation:
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?
How might one cite interlocutors more than human while accounting for the apparatuses whereby human and nonhuman are differentially articulated? How might one cite empirical formations while remaining responsive to the entangled state of their existence?
Do different stories render different cities? Or is it, as so exquisitely suggested by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1974), that different framings focus a city differently, evoking a multiplicity of stories, each one rendering some aspects of a landscape intelligible to the exclusion of others?
How are empirics made legible as data by the apparatuses that produce them? How are technoscientific and affective orientations to ‘what counts as data’ co-constitutive of an empirical account of the city?
I am particularly invested in how the apparatuses through which differential embodiment is constituted effect different possibilities for knowing.
Questions emerging from my studies and practices the first term of my PhD:
How does research-creation complicate commodities? What might a postcapitalist politics look like that doesn't presuppose the boundary between human and nonhuman? How might materiality be repoliticized within a diverse economy?
What happens when gifted materials intermingle with so-called commodities? What would it mean for a feminist political economy to recognize, as Barad (2007) does, that "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)? How might we account for hauntings materials inherit as they are discursively refigured?
What might it mean to cultivate an acknowledgement practice for hauntings matters inherit as they undergo physical-conceptual refigurings?
What are the possibilities for interfering with the tyranny of top-down orientations without asserting a counterhegemony—for "elud[ing] discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised…" (de Certeau 1984, 96)?
Questions emerging from my studies and practices the second term of my PhD:
How might the analytic or "theoretical platform" (Heynen et al. 2006, 8) practiced by urban political ecologists re/orient my approach to urban investigations and the questions that drive my research-creation forwards? How does denaturalizing, historicizing, and politicizing alleyways reorient my practice of urban gleaning? How does it change the way I inhabit/engage the urban everyday?
How does gleaning primarily residential alleyways for physical objects differ from other practices of urban scavenging such as food reclamation and redeemable recyclable collection? From the immediacy of walking Vancouver's alleyways, I step/scale back in order to critically consider alleys as infrastructure. What role do alleys play in urban metabolism? What can be gleaned by approaching alleys as sites of continuing circulation that a focus waste/value dialectic of discard under capitalism overlooks by focusing on the contained, exceptional spaces of dumpsters and landfills?
David Hugill calls on geographers to "renovate and extend their interpretations of the 'urban' implications of colonial practice" (2017, 2). Yet, in thinking with what I've learned this term, I'm inclined to refigure his question in order to ask: What are the colonial implications of my urban practices, specifically alleyway gleaning? My contention is that the colonial implications of settler urban practices may be a significant object/site of inquiry, especially when those practices are assumed to be counter-hegemonic. What does it mean to situate alleyway gleaning as an alternate or marginal form of circulation, one happening alongside the disposal of waste which constitutes capitalist market value, when alleys are denaturalized and politicized? What does it mean to participate in noncapitalist forms of circulation such as scavenging and gleaning when the giving and taking of these excesses or surpluses is facilitated by an infrastructure that maintains ongoing urbanization of a settler-colonial city?
Questions emerging from crafting, 2025
Grounded in the theoretical work of Karen Barad and Erin Manning, I approach crafting as a
physical-conceptual practice of thinking with nonhuman others in production of distributed knowledges.
To think through creative practice is known as research-creation and outputs traditionally consist of
artistic artifacts alongside of the conventional linear monograph. My research-creation outputs,
however, posit the two as inextricable by integrating text and multimedia together in websites I craft
by hand. While I have previously considered the process of crafting these digital spaces, I have yet to
think through the ways in which their form and formation imbricate digital and material craftwork, and
the effects this might have on either crafting practice.
How do physical, digital, and conceptual matters shape one another in craftwork? How might concepts such
as tension, slack, hem, and fray come into play in the crafting of digital spaces? Rather than reduce
tactility, could the multimodality of handmade websites offer a means to synesthetically feel through
the digital?
Questions articulated through constructing my comps lists:
What of the structural can be seen in the everyday? How do I theorize the urban everyday, and what does it offer in terms of parsing phenomena?
What does it mean to generate situated knowledges of (and from within and as part of) the city? Refiguring David Hugill's call for geographers to examine the "'urban' implications of colonial practice" (2017, 2), what are the colonial implications of my urban practices as a settler in Vancouver?
If theory is emplaced, to what extent are theories locally adaptable elsewhere? In other words, what of "the local" transcends the particularity of place? Or, what can context give us and what is generalizable, abstractable? Who says? What's unifying and what's divergent about urban praxis from place to place?
Does thinking with and through spatial practices of urban inhabitation open up particular ways of thinking cities? How do everyday navigations shape infra/structural relations, city imaginaries, and the production of urban space?
How might we hold together different—incommensurable, even—framings of the city? Which concepts, theories, practices, methodologies, and ethics might aid in this endeavor?
How might digital geographies ground my research of how the city comes to differentially matter through everyday navigations which, more and more, are directed by Google Maps?
How do physical and digital configurations of "the city" become entangled through pedestrian use of Google Maps? To what extent are navigational web maps mediating users' experience of the city/urban surround? How might process philosophy's premise of immediation (which bears ontoepistemological similarities to agential realism) trouble dichotomies of the structural and experiential, direct/localized/singular/differentiated and distributed? What conceptions of scale in relation to bodies and sensory apparatuses are complicated by a "politics of immediation" (Manning 2020)?
Why has Google Maps become so widely used? For whom is Google Maps useful and for whom is the using of Google Maps valuable? What is the commodity at the heart of Google Maps? In expanding its products through Google Earth Outreach Tools, of which the Google Maps Platform is but a part, what new audiences does Google desire to attract and why?
How are different disciplines and subdisciplines approaching ubiquitous locative media, and the Google Maps Platform in particular? What kinds of studies are being conducted and how are they structured? What questions are being asked and to what ends? Should I do a study, what questions might I ask and why?
What are the experiential and structural consequences of using Google Maps for navigating the city? How are these formulated across fields of study and what is foregrounded/backgrounded in the process? Are the stakes the same for everyone?