Terms of Engagement

In this Knowledge-Land-Scape you get to be a wayfarer.

To be a wayfarer, is not about moving from point A to point B. Wayfaring is about moving alongside others, and responsively being able to make decisions in-between and along the way. When such a process is applied to the challenge of cross-cultural knowledge conciliation, this also – as will become clear - entails a degree of shared meaning making with others. Such others, in the case of this Knowledge-Land-Scape, are numerous and will include also me, the author of this scape. As such, and in line with the principles of the Ethical Space of Engagement (Ermine, 2007), I want to propose some terms of engagement.

Invitation Based

Firstly, while it is not quite possible to forgo becoming a wayfarer once you enter this Knowledge-Land-Scape, you do have the agency to make your own choices as you make your way across this knowledge-land-scape. You will have the possibility to keep following a “cut”, and read “about” my research as part of the BearWatch project. Should you choose to accept (some of) the invitations along the way, however, this should come with the understanding that such a decision to diverge from the cut, entails your willingness to become an active and immersed agent of shared meaning-making within my research.

Respecting Difference

Secondly, the knowledge-land-scape, that you are about to enter is comprised of (digitized) materials. They are ethnographic traces like voice notes, photos, drawings, edited videos, written notes, posters and presentations, as well as academic texts and workshops, resulting from the more-than-human aesthetic encounters that were part of my fieldwork. My knowledge-land-scape is explicitly not about providing “direct” access to the land or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (nor is such a thing possible, or desirable). It adheres to Inuit-driven EEE protocol 3 , in that it respects cultural “differences”. My work does not somehow make otherwise “remote” regions legible, accessible or available for consumption. Nor does it take the liberty to “represent” IQ, or “map out” Inuit Nunangat as if it were a blank slate, or “empty” space available for inscription or re-interpretation by non-Inuit researchers like me. As such this work doesn’t work towards descriptive representations of Inuit land or Knowledge. It acts instead as an emergent topology of the insights that emerged as part of my research encounters, and materializes in-between subject-object, reader-author, and land-scape.

Boundaries

As such not everything is possible within this knowledge-land-scape. The land-scape as it emerges within this web-based platform is not meant to sketch a comprehensive and complete overview of the institutional or socio-political apparatus of community-based polar bear management. It is rather bounded by the particular more-than-human encounters of my fieldwork, the apparatus of western science and polar bear co-management, available financial resources and the technical affordances of the software with which it was built- as well as the intra-dynamics of all these matters. Although the knowledge-land-scape of my research thus indeed materializes for the reader based on their own choices, the possibilities and conditions for these choices are nevertheless still bounded by my decisive cuts as a researcher.

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