Learning About Staying With the Trouble

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).