Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
everyday assumptions are based. Settled ideas and practices of disciplines and meth-
odologies, ethics and politics are all are thrown into question. The implications of
these unsettlements are now briefl y sketched out.
Entangling disciplines and methodologies
An after-natural worldview challenges settled disciplinary divisions and methodolo-
gies in Geography. If particular formations in the world, say networks of food
production and consumption, involve a whole set of interacting processes and ele-
ments spanning conventional divides between the natural and social, then the
forensic skills of both the natural and social sciences are needed. But they need to
be employed, fi rst in the acknowledgement that they are studying a symptom, an
organ in a larger body (rather than a entire body), and second, in ways which can
communicate with other investigations to build more holistic accounts ('epistemic
fungibility'). Thus, the after nature approach seeks to dissolve rigid disciplinary
boundaries and to promote new multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or even trans-
disciplinary ways of working (Nowotny et al., 2001). There are at least some signs
that this key insight is getting through to those who drive research agendas. For
example the Research Councils UK 'Rural Economy and Land Use' (RELU) pro-
gramme insisted that applying teams had to demonstrate a multidisciplinary
approach to various rural environmental processes ranging from food chains, pol-
lution and water catchment area management.
Explorations of various forms of interdisciplinarity are emerging in Geography
(Evans
and Randalls, 2008; Harrison et al., 2008; Lau and Pasquini, 2008), Anthro-
pology (Strathern, 2004) and beyond. But it is early days in terms of what these
disciplinary reconfi gurations will look like and how (indeed, whether) they will
work to generate new after-natural knowledges. This is about more than just placing
disciplines side-by-side (Whatmore, 1999). It is also about changing the ontological
and political basis for scientifi c research, admitting and then embracing the idea of
knowledges as interventions in the 'creative becoming of the earth' (Braun, 2003,
p. 175). But it is likely that differing entanglements will
require a [new] procedural methodology, taking seriously the particularities of the sites,
the unpredictability of circumstances, the uneven patterns of landscapes and the haz-
ardous nature of becoming. (Henaff, 1997, p. 72)
With regard to methodologies employed by disciplines, after-natural approaches do
not entail a complete abandonment of the many forms of expertise that have devel-
oped to describe aspects of the world. Rather, they redefi ne how, where, and in
what ways expertise is deployed:
There are many ways to know the world and many forms of expertise have developed
to describe aspects of the world. To backtrack [ ] is not to abandon the expertise that
has developed in investigating and exploring it. (Harrison et al., 2004, p. 7).
The approaches set out above, particularly new ecology, ANT, place and dwelling
(if taken in connection with affective performativity), promote various new kinds
of interdisciplinary engagement. In turn those frameworks of after-natural knowl-
edge include - rather than sit outside - questions of ethics and politics.
