A life in the woods - Harris

My fieldwork with activists living on UK protest camps revealed the impact of spending extended periods of time in the organic environment. The wilderness effect – previously described in the context of US treks in places like the Grand Canyon – was apparent even in comparatively urban environments and catalysed a spiritual emergence for several people. I begin by explaining the context of protest site activism and spirituality. I then draw on my fieldwork to describe how key aspects of the wilderness effect were expressed on UK protest sites and discuss some of the life changing experiences catalysed by the effect. I then outline my model of embodied situated cognition and use it to provide a partial explanation for how the wilderness effect works.

2016

My thesis project focuses on the current literary field of Ecocriticism, its historical transmutations, and the correlation of the pastoral genre, as one begins to understand current human understandings of “nature.” By applying a deeper understanding of the Deep Ecology movement, along with shifting understandings of the human and the non-human, specifically in our usage and attention to landscape and wilderness, I hope to explore the role that the aesthetic, and the function of the poem, can play a crucial role in the environmental movement. By building a foundational understanding of our cultural context and critical theories of Environmental criticism, I hope to illuminate the necessary ways that place, body, and language/perception all interact with each other to create a specific experiential moment of nature. This environmental epiphany can be modeled best in the poem that reflects the “thisness” of nature, as Hopkins calls it, and emphasizes the aura/essence of the land with...

This auto-ethnography of my research at UK protest sites illustrates how the power of place can catalyse a Pagan spirituality.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

In this short paper, we pay attention to what an autoethnography might do. In relationality we understand autoethnographic practices as assembling and dissembling bodies that are active in always territorialising space and in world making. They have the capacity to affect and be affected and therefore, as performing and performative practices, they act and are acted upon. With Madison, we see these acts as activist, and we therefore see autoethnographic practice as always shifting, always about movement, intensity and potentiality; it never resides, it lives in the creation of the next moment, the next step into the not yet known.

The Routledge International Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography, 2020

As a white, Scottish woman living on violently acquired, never-ceded Gadigal land on the east coast of what we now call Australia, I came to see that I was part of a big, unresolved problem. I understood this through engagement with Indigenous people and Indigenous scholarship, certainly. But it was mainly through hiking that I came to feel most viscerally what it means to be in place or out of place. This understanding, in turn, led me to leave the last of the "homes" I'd imagined for myself in twenty-five years of living overseas. Earlier this year (2019), I came "home" to Scotland, where my ancestors go back tens of generations, maybe more. This chapter considers the idea of organization in two ways. First, I discuss the tangible organization of how one comes to hike and camp in the wilderness as a woman who goes alone. Second, I interrogate the rather less tangible organization of my own identity through hiking in places that are conceptualized as either colonized and/or colonizer. That is to say that hiking in Australia and then later in Scotland was how I organized my thinking about my own identity, its place in the world, and how this brings me to a sense of where I feel at home. Using embodied, walking methodologies (Springgay & Truman, 2018), I consider the notion of homeland through a lens of decolonization. Hiking on stolen Aboriginal land feels very different from hiking in the Scottish Highlands, even though it, too, was 'cleared' of its original inhabitants. In this chapter, then, I present insights from walking in both contexts as a way of coming to understand my own place in two very different de-populated homelands.

Journal of Transformative Praxis, 2021

Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers' painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers' critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers' research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.

Animals, Disability, and the End of Capitalism, 2019

is comprehensive text is the rst to introduce evocative autoethnography as a methodology and a way of life in the human sciences. Using numerous examples from their work and others, world-renowned scholars Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, originators of the method, emphasize how to connect intellectually and emotionally to the lives of readers throughout the challenging process of representing lived experiences. Written as the story of a ctional workshop, based on many similar sessions led by the authors, it incorporates group discussions, common questions, and workshop handouts. e book:

2015

This article examines the role of stories in ecological activism. It first situates stories inside object ecologies, encompassing relationships of reliance, care and maintenance of things. It suggests that ecologies of this sort work as an extended mind where our cognition takes place and meaning is apprehended, so that what we can think of is always a function of what we have ‘at hand’. The article then considers how these ecologies are impacted by discourses on climate change and peak oil, which stress the impossibility to keep ordering our lives through the same entanglements that have supported them so far. A dissonance arises between the sort of demands and dependencies we are still subject to on a daily basis and the anticipation that those demands and dependencies shall not be able to endure. Stories of transition, which tread a middle ground between denial and collapse hysteria, dissipate this tension. In so doing, they contribute to the growing of alternative sacred forms, working as attractors that constitute groups as moral collectives. These forms are woven through alternative entanglements of objects, bodies and other stories, providing determinate implication for action, from the indeterminacy of the unknowns of climate change and peak oil.