Terms of Engagement
To be a wayfarer, in opposition to being a traveller, is not about moving across from point A to point B. Wayfaring is about 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 in line with the principles of the ESE, this also – as will become clear - entails a degree of shared meaning making with others. In this case, such others will include me. As such, and in line with the principles of the ESE, I want to propose some terms of engagement between us as reader and author.
Invitation Based
Firstly, it is possible to forgo this invitation to become a wayfarer. As you will enter and make your way across this knowledge-land-scape, you will have the possibility to keep following this “cut”, and read “about” my process of wayfaring the BearWatch project. Should you choose to accept (some of) my invitations (along the way), however, this should come with the understanding that such a decision entails your willingness to become an active and immersed agent in the ensuing material opening and closing opportunities for 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.