Walk 'til You Run Out of Water

Phillips, Perdita

doi:10.1080/13528165.2012.671078

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…On the train, we are moving fast, thanks to fossil fuel: mining (and the water it uses) brings our bodies to places that would be otherwise difficult to access. Walking through Blast Furnace park, even in the absence of the now-defunct furnace, the park's name seems to amplify our thirst and our sweat, in this hot and dry landscape-the rhythm of the walk is even shaped by thirst (see Phillips, 2012). Stopping by Lake Pillans, the shade provides a cooling respite, but the water is only there because it was once called upon to cool that long-gone furnace.…”

Section: Posthuman Phenomenology Bodies Of Water and Proxy Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postcards from the Underground

Neimanis

Phillips²

2019

JPP

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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.

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Section: Posthuman Phenomenology Bodies Of Water and Proxy Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%