Learning About Staying With the Trouble
You have encountered a Great White Beast!
The Great White Beast is a fleeting, shapeshifting figure that performs the world as "indeterminate".
Although it holds a reference to polar bears, or more accurately- a moniker that is employed within Inuit custom- to respectfully avoid talking about polar bears’ (Jimmy Qirqut, Gjoa Haven Elder, 2022), this figure also gestures towards the "Great White Beast" of colonialism, while simultaneously also evoking a frame of more-than-human agencies that extend beyond our own comprehension or capacities: a “beast of a problem”.
It is in the spirit of this last frame that the figure of the "Great White Beast" performs in this Knowledge-Land-Scape. As an invitation to stay with the trouble: a 'learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of place, times, matters, and meanings.”<ref>Haraway, D. J. (2016 p.1). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. In Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press.<\ref>
Encountering a Great White Beast, reminds us that there are no right decisions to be made, but that we are nevertheless to account for our decisions. Especially when there are no simple or right answers.
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 my positionality as a researcher, the methods I have used and the concepts I have applied to create this scape, it is important to make explicit which futurities I have aimed to contribute towards while creating this scape (Barad 2007, p. 185).
Great White Beasts provide insights into such decisions, even if they can not all be addressed within this Knowledge-Land-Scape.