As you enter this knowledge-land-scape you take up the fictional role of a community-based researcher that tries to make their way through an existing large polar bear monitoring project while seeking to answer the following question; “What does it mean to practice knowledge conciliation guided by the principles of the ethical space of engagement, rather than by data-driven needs?”

You don’t have to answer this question by yourself, however. As you proceed, you will be making decisions in correspondence with me, the author of this knowledge-land-scape. As my research practices and experiences of being a part of the BearWatch project unfold narratives, you may trace them as auto-ethnographic cuts across this knowledge-land-scape.

You can follow alongside these cuts, to make sense of ethical engagement in community-based research, together with me. You can however also, and are explicitly invited to, divert from these cuts and take any possibility to navigate this knowledge-land-scape as you please. As you make your way along my research processes, it might come to your attention that you are also moving alongside and across the traces of multiple others. As I did, you might encounter various of those others along your way, and you will have to make your own decisions on how you want to respond and proceed across this knowledge-land-scape. Will you allow yourself to take the risks that come with diverting from your course? Or will you continue tracing my cuts in the hope of finding conclusive answers?

You have scrolled down to see if you can find further guidance. However, in this case it seems like you have to make some choices that pull you outside of your present position towards an unknown future. You’ll have to trust that you will gain more insights as you go, and make your choices carefully. For now, you can only "keep going". Click the "Keep Going" button to your right to finish the rest of this short “wayfaring tutorial”.

Cuts, Threads and Trails

This space provides three available storylines that "cut" across the knowledge-land-scape. Each cut corresponds to what conventionally would be referred to as a PhD dissertation manuscript: 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 one of the three cuts. Once you have chosen a cut, follow the “keep going” prompt on the right side of your screen, to keep tracing that storyline. To keep following a particular cut is to trace my research across the scape in its most-straight-forward manner to eventually arrive at “another point of beginning” where I account its “story-so-far”. A story-so-far may include more classic research outputs, like published articles or it may explain how the open-ended nature of the cut allows for ongoing impacts or future possibilities.

As mentioned before, apart from tracing my cuts, it is also possible to thread your own way through the storylines of the knowledge-land-scape. This becomes possible by responding to the many options to pivot, or detour from your initially chosen cut: an affordance that seeks to facilitate what Anthropologist Tim Ingold calls “wayfaring”. Although all possibilities in this knowledge-land-scape are based on my own recorded experiences, observations and research processes, it is the careful maintenance of their open-ended nature that makes it possible for you to feel your own way alongside them within this space. In fact, it is by this very refusal to enclose them in conclusive findings, that you can start following another cut halfway your journey, or trail-off in response to an invitation you encounter on the way. In this knowledge-land-scape you might even be pushed off course by unanticipated events or astonishing new insights. Within this knowledge-land-scape I propose such redirectives as being either “invitations” or “ice pressure ridges”.

Keep going to learn about invitations and ice pressure ridges.

Redirectives: Invitations

As you make your way along the knowledge-land-scape, you will encounter different possibilities to trail-off. Some of these possibilities come in the form of various invitations, while others come in the shape of ice-pressure ridges. They both allow, in their own different ways for a responsive redirection, away from your previous course. Let’s start with learning about invitations.

You are invited to learn about invitations. You can hover over the “invitation” button that has appeared in the left bottom corner to unveil more about this invitation. Note that you don’t have to accept this, or any other invitation in the knowledge-land-scape for that matter. You can also “keep going” to stay on your current course. In this tutorial, however, it is important to check out the invitation. When you are ready to accept, click the button.

Learning About Invitations

Redirectives: Ice Pressure Ridges

"Ice Pressure ridges" are the second redirective possibility to pivot from your prior course. The ice pressure ridge is a figure that gestures towards the agencies of the land itself. They remind us that agency is not a property that is possessed by individual readers, researchers and authors. Our ways of becoming knowledgeable always correspond intradependently with many other agential forces, both human and non-human. Ice pressure ridges perform a redirective of a seemingly less voluntary nature than the invitations explained before. That is because an ice-pressure ridge does not so much depend on our active attunements, as it submits and exposes us to the conditions and boundaries within which we encounter the larger apparatuses at play. Ice pressure ridges de/marcate both the boundaries of this knowledge-land-scape, as well as the extent of possibilities for readers to make their own tracing/threading/wayfaring choices. Not everything is possible in community research, nor in this knowledge-land-scape.

You have encountered an ice-pressure ridge. Note that in this case you can not “keep going”, you are forced to go off course, and trail longside this ridge. click the “Ice Pressure Ridge” button when you are ready to learn more about ice pressure ridges.

Learning About Ice Pressure Ridges