Conference calls from the road

This pandemic has functioned as a double-edged sword. On the one hand it has caused a significant delay, and obstruction in terms of building community relations in the field. On the other hand, the delays allowed for more time to think about how to contribute to the BearWatch research project in a way that honours my professional background and matched my personal ethics. Covid-19 also provided opportunities. It also opened pathways, for example, to initiate remote connections with research partners in Gjoa Haven through communication platforms like zoom and conference calls.

As such the pandemic, has had significant and lasting impacts on the material circumstances under which I continued to work on my PhD, but it also invited new possibilities.

Such invitations may take different shapes and forms, like offering someone a ride, playing bingo or staying around to drink a cup of coffee. It is up to you to decide whether you want to accept these invitations or not. They allow you to divert from previous trajectories and extend towards a practice of wayfaring and dwelling- to "waste" time and to be curious. Being receptive and open to such invitations is also the most effective way in this knowledge-land-scape to encounter insights on the meaning of “ethical engagement”. As I have found from my own experiences in the field, the most insightful moments happen by responding to unanticipated encounters and phenomena with attuned curiosity and attentive openness.

Keep going to learn more about how Covid-19 shaped new possibilities for thinking about movement and dwelling in my research.

Thinking From the Road

Butter on driveway

View from inside Butter, taking evening conference calls

On September 11th of 2020, the second of what would in total become three- two-hour long– conference calls between three principle investigators, me and several representatives of the Gjoa Haven HTO, took place. I was, in the week of those conference calls, self-isolating in my campervan “Butter”, and taking these calls “on the road”.

To be somewhat more independent and self-reliant I had bought a campervan: “Butter”, and had taken it out in September to gain a more embodied understanding of the country I was living in. Making sure to still take covid-precautions into account, I had stocked up on groceries in my local Kingston “Food Basic” grocery store, and continued isolating myself. I however did so from the road, while exploring more of the province.

Butter

"Butter", became an important companion to my research. As times remained ongoingly uncertain, and several waves of Covid-19 variants kept reappearing, with the campus, and most of Kingston’s public life shut down, I had decided to give up my apartment in Kingston in June, 2021 and chose to base myself closer to "home", in the Netherlands. There I awaited my moment of return to the North.

I didn't have to wait long. A month after this decision, research in Nunavut became possible again.

Having bought Butter, it remained possible for me- after Covid restrictions were lifted- to spend extended months of time in Canada despite lacking an apartment. Butter provided a way of transport and a comfortable place to sleep. Butter also provided me a way of staying connected to my friends in Kingston and allowed for my journey as a guest within the country to continue. In fact, Butter provided a completely different perspective to the country, than remaining in my apartment in Kingston would likely have offered me. Butter mobilized me, and its limited interior space would push me to spend a lot of time outside. I went on walks, wrote in my diary and read books that I had borrowed from the Queen’s libraries across the region.

Screenshot of googlemaps showing my location history in Ontario 2019-2024

Writing and Reading in Flux

pages from diary about "becoming"

Practices of reading and writing, like any other practice, are co-constitutively shaped by the material conditions and possibilities around them. They do not happen in a vacuum.

The material circumstances of my PhD have slowly unveiled themselves as being in a constant state of flux in-between different geographical locations. Not all seasons are suitable for living in a campervan in Ontario. Funding and project cycles do not adapt to personal circumstances, and neither do Northern communities when it comes to their seasonal window of opportunity to act on their own responsibilities, desires and routines. Responding to these fluctuating conditions and possibilities, I was launched into a process of constantly moving-in-between places. For three years my physical whereabouts were intra-dependent with the unfolding of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the seasons, the schedule of the BearWatch research project, family-affairs, friendships and romances. I was constantly travelling in-between Ontario, Nunavut and the Netherlands, as well as timezones, geographies, and climates.

Dwelling

The result of this constant movement was a stronger attuning to the particularities of being “present” in different places and the importance of ‘dwelling’ in all its plural manifestations of shelter and sedimentation. Keeping an auto-ethnographic research journal has assisted in making the process of such attuning insightful.

The fourth year of my research anchored me more firmly in the Netherland- as the BearWatch funding cycle came to an end and the push and pulls of the project demanded fewer physical relocations. I found time and space to dwell with my (auto-)ethnographic writings. This writing shaped not a final stage of my work - reporting on, or describing the insights produced by a linearly executed research design for the purpose of disseminating - but rather formed a continuation of the research itself. Re-turning to the material, while blurring hard divisions of practice and theory to perform my writing as a space, and practice of emergent, reiterative, and ongoing processes of encounter allowed for a form of knowing as "movement and dwelling".

You have encountered a Landmark insight! Take a closer look to understand what this means.

Emergent Landmark: Knowledge as Movement and Dwelling