Instructions: ways to navigate this space

This space is designed as an associative scape. You can start pulling on a thread, or follow a trace that has been left by those that have come before. You are free to navigate as you please- and within the possibilities of the platform, you are explicitly invited to explore.

Tracks and trails

People that prefer a guided journey have the possibility to trace along certain tracks that "cut" across the knowledge-land-scape in particular ways. Each cut corresponds to what conventionally would be referred to as a manuscript in a PhD dissertation; i) Voices of Thunder, ii) Aesthetic Action, and iii) Wayfaring the BW project. You may enter the knowledge-Land-Scape by making a choice between different Points of Beginning- each corresponding to a respective cut. To follow a particular cut is to trace it across the scape- something that will be obvious as you start moving. As you trace each cut runs across the knowledge-land-scape, you are either re-directed by the material forces of emergent ice-pressure ridges (a land-based metaphor for the more the more-than-human agencies that intra-actively shape the conditions under which you can find your way through this scape)), or invited to trail-off and dwell on unexpected side-tracks. There will be plenty of options to pivot, or detour from your chosen direction. You can start following another cut, or trail-off in response to invitations you encounter on the way, if you so choose to.

Invitations and pressure ridges

"Invitations" to trail-off allow readers to wayfare or dwell- to be curious, to divert from previous trajectories, "waste" time and be curious. It is also the most effective way to encounter "hidden" vistas and landmarks along the way. Being receptive and open to such invites guides you towards the most thought-provoking vistas and meaningful emergent insights. In turn these will help you orient among, and respond to the different agential forces that de/markate this knowledge-land-scape.

"Pressure ridges" are re-directive agential forces that perform the de/markations of the KLS, and the im/possibilities of how we can move through the KLS. It's a referral to the agential forces and apparatuses at play which mark the extent of possibilities within a particular generative cut - in this case it marks the boundaries of what is included in the KLS, and it also marks the boundaries of the extent that users can make tracing/threading/wayfaring choices. Not everything is possible within a given phenomena- including this KLS.

Emergent vistas and insights

Along the way you may encounter different agential phenomena. They appear as either; i) Vista’s, ii) Landmarks, iii)Shipwrecks, or iv)Great white beasts.

Vistas

Vistas, or ethical principles, function to assist in your orientation as you may seek to ethically engage with some of the work that you encounter along the way. Vistas unveil the ethical outlines on which I have relied to chart my course across the knowledge-land-scape of my research. They are emergent aspirational guidelines that may help guide you along the different tracks and trails you intra-act with. These trails are, after all, shaped by my personal considerations and response-abilities while I navigated this scape.

Landmarks

Landmarks perform emergent insights in response to tracing and threading certain sequential actions or practices. As you are re-redirected by pressure ridges and enticed to trail-off along certain sidetracks, you are presented with particular insights. These insights are directly connected to your responsive and immersive engagement with other agents of the KLS. Did you partake in coffee breaks, bingo, trying country food, and give people rides? To the dump for example? Or to get ice? This is where much emergent insights on ethical engagement can be encountered- and as such they are almost exclusively presented at side-trails, or along pressure ridges.

Great White Beasts

Encountering a Great White Beast, reminds us that there are no right decisions to be made, but that we are nevertheless to hold ourselves accountable to our own decision-making. When the world is ‘remade’ in each meeting, it means that there is an imperative to take responsibility for the intra-active relations you build and the future relations your actions makes possible or foreclose (Barad, 2007 p.x; see also Rosiek & Adkins-Cartee, 2023 p.160). Considering that the possible relations that can emerge in this scape are partially influenced by the positionality of the researcher, the methods they used and the concepts they applied to create this scape, it is important to make explicit which futurities were contributed towards while creating this scape (Barad 2007, p. 185). Great White Beasts provide insights into my own my abilities to respond and allow us to "stay with the trouble". I am inspired by the figure of the “great white beast”, a moniker that is employed within Inuit custom, to respectfully avoid talking about polar bears, by referring to them as ‘’great white beasts’’ (Jimmy Qirqut, Gjoa Haven Elder, 2022).

Shipwrecks

The shipwreck is a figure that performs the presence of the agential apparatus of (inter)national science-based polar bear conservation, management and monitoring- which the Bearwatch project is entangled within. The difference between what can exist, and what can not exist as part of a phenomena, are produced within phenomena by the im/material agencies of the (inquiring) apparatus-in encounter that constantly make and remake such determining agential cuts. ‘Our inquiries, in other words, do not simply generate knowledge, they generate realities’ (Rosiek, in Leavy, 2017 p. 638). Here and there, the shipwrecks of the larger settler-colonial state apparatus reveal themselves as materially constitutive agents in the KLS.

Other points of beginning (Under construction)

Eventually all cuts run into other points of beginning. These are not conclusive endings to this work, but rather perform a cusp of emergence- a story so-far. Some of these points mark the end of funding cycles or research projects, or mark the limitations and scope of this particular Phd dissertation. Others are trails, and tracks that have faded out, as they remained un-revisited. The qualifying indicators of interest to me here, when it comes to ethical space, practice and processes of engagement, are not measurable outcomes or even impacts, at the end of a track. They are the degree of animated open-endedness to which certain cuts, tracks and side-trails have provided spaces for intra-active, and emergent insights to be co-authored alongside them, and in-between us, along the way. In other words, ethical space, process and practice in polar bear monitoring research is a not so much a question of respectful implementation of ethical principles as it is a matter of willingness to pry open engage, a guided

As such, I would suggest to embark on your journey

3 choices? Interface?