Instructions: ways to navigate this space

As you enter this knowledge-land-scape you take up the role of a fictional community-based researcher that tries to make their way through a 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?”

This space allows you to engage with this question as you move along the traces of those that have come before you. In correspondence with the dissertation author you are guided along particular cuts across the knowledge-land-scape, that help you make sense of ethical engagement in community-based research. You are explicitly invited, however, to divert from your course and take any opportunity to navigate knowledge-land-scape as you please. To make sure that your journey will be as meaningful as possible, you are nevertheless advised to first read the instructions below.

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. To keep tracing your original cut, follow the “keep going” prompt on the right side of your screen. To keep following a particular cut is to trace it across the scape in the most-straight-forward manner, to eventually arrive at “another point of beginning” where its “story-so-far” is accounted for. At this point you are presented with more classic research outputs, like published papers or results so-far, and are invited to trace another cut through the knowledge-land-scape or retrace your steps through the scape.

It is also possible to thread your own way through the knowledge-land-scape by responding to the many options to pivot, or detour from your initial course. It is possible to start following another cut halfway your journey, or to trail-off in response to an invitation you encounter on the way. Or perhaps you are pushed of course by unanticipated events or new insights. Such redirectives are categorized as either “invitations” or “ice pressure ridges”.

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?