Postcards from the Underground

Abstract

This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenomenon—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attunement to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a coming together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, the authors turn to Lauren Berlant’s recent writing on the commons. They suggest that their walkshop was what Berlant would call ‘training’ in living with the awkward and complicit relations of being in common.

From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

“…This was disquieting and uncomfortable, although not necessarily negative. Neimanis and Phillips (2019) used proxy stories in a walk thinking about invisible water sources and conflicts over water in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples; they discuss the ambivalence of their own positionality and suggest 'sometimes complicity just is and that can still be part of resistance and change ' (2019, 135). This unravelling of a benign Stopes is perhaps the most psychogeographic aspect of the whole tour, revealing both the construction of the tour and its ideological underpinnings.…”

Wild Swimming Methodologies for Decolonial Feminist Justice-to-Come Scholarship

“…These also disturb the notion of neoliberal capitalist and anthropocentric individualised subjectivity as outside of accountability and responsibility for others and the planetary condition (Braidotti, 2019). Emerging methodologies, such as Slow 2 scholarship (Martell, 2014;Mountz et al, 2015;Bozalek, 2017;Leibowitz and Bozalek, 2018), wild methodologies (Jickling et al, 2018), walking methodologies Truman, 2018, 2019;Arora, 2019;Goulding, 2019;Leane, 2019;Neimanis and Phillips, 2019;O'Neill and Einashe, 2019;Pratt and Johnston, 2019;Somerville et al, 2019) as well as indigenous healing walking practices (Wong, 2013) and other embodied, affective methodologies exemplify some of the many current efforts to reconceptualise and reconfigure scholarly practices. This article thinks with oceanic swimming within the (post-)apartheid space of South African higher education, where both authors have worked at a university for many years.…”