How did creek detritus interfere with our thinking about weathering, time and waste?
Shared by VERONICA PACINI-KETCHABAW, MINDY BLAISE, AND AFFRICA TAYLOR
How did creek detritus interfere with our thinking about weathering, time and waste? We’re on a bush salon retreat in the Wee Jasper valley – playing with feminist common worlding methods. Tonya and Felicity joined us to experiment with ways of thinking across the concepts of weathering, time and waste. We’d already read Tonya’s article ‘Weathering Time’ against Myra Hird’s article ‘Knowing Waste’. Both challenge the limits of humanist ways of knowing. To challenge the limits of our own reading, discussion and knowing practices, we set off on a walk along a nearby creek – still thinking across these same concepts, but now in the presence of the creek. It was easy to spot human waste, but it was the unruly piles of storm and flood timbers that interfered with our thought flow. This chaotic creek detritus was compelling – a tangled cacophony of deep time, human time and new life – all thrown together. It honed our sensitivities to the uncontainable exuberance of the inhuman.
References
Hird, M. (2012) Knowing Waste: Towards an inhuman epistemology, Social Epistemology, 26 (3-4 ): 453-469 https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2012.727195
Rooney, T. (2018) Weathering Time: Walking with young children in a changing climate, Children’s Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1474172
