Cut 3 Conference Calls from the Road
Conference Calls from the Road
The Covid-19 pandemic functioned as a double-edged sword.
On the one hand it has caused a significant delays, and obstruction in terms of building community relations in the field.
On the other hand, Covid-19 also provided possibilities. It allowed for more time to think about how to contribute to the BearWatch research project in a way that honored my professional background and matched my personal ethics.
Uncertainty
Times remained ongoingly uncertain, and several waves of Covid-19 variants kept reappearing. I decided to buy a van to gain some independency: "Butter".
Eventually, 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.
Butter
No longer having an apartment in Kingston, "Butter", became an important companion to my research. Butter, made it 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. It 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.
Thinking From the Road
Butter and I became slowly ceased to exist in fixed times and spaces, but rather became present through "openings", where time, space, connectivity and attention collided - for example, to initiate remote connections with research partners in Gjoa Haven through zoom and conference calls.
Writing and Reading in Flux
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.
For two and a half 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".