Way Markers in the Practice of Shambling: A Method for Communal Discernment

Abstract

This article traces the development of a place-based approach that contributes to exploration of post-qualitative methods. Working with the question, how can our understanding of embodied learning lead to habits of embodied inquiry that shift our relation to what socio-ecological justice means in this time? we embarked on a writing/making/sensing time in a series of different academic workspaces. The reflections and poems recount our developing awareness of what it would mean to turn away from exploitative terms of exploration and toward ones guided by Indigenous wisdom, not just as a rhetorical flourish, but as everyday embodied keeping faith with Indigenous principles through and beyond all research phases. What we present here is not a new set of skills but a shift in orientation that brings the weight of our experiences, knowledges, and personhoods to the fore, and asks us to locate and presence ourselves in and with the breath of the world. We note that this practice shifts the quality and relationality of storying that emerge from the practice and the role embodied knowledge plays within them. We conclude with reflections on the application of this practice to the different phases of research.