In this paper, we invite you night fishing for wäkun at Bawaka, an Indigenous homeland in North East Arnhem Land, Australia. As we hunt wäkun, we discuss our work as an Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more-than-human research collective trying to attend deeply to the messages we send and receive from, with and as a part of Country. The wäkun, and all the animals, plants, winds, processes, things, dreams and people that emerge together in nourishing, coconstitutive ways to create Bawaka Country, are the author-ity of our research. Our reflection is both methodological and ontological as we aim to attend deeply to Country and deliberate on what a Yolŋu ontology of co-becoming, that sees everything as knowledgeable, vital and interconnected, might mean for the way academics do research. We discuss a methodology of attending underpinned by a relational ethics of care. Here, care stems from an awareness of our essential co-constitution as we care for, and are cared for by, the myriad human and more-thanhuman becomings that emerge together to create Bawaka. We propose that practising relational research requires researchers to open themselves up to the reality of their connections with the world, and consider what it means to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it. We end with a call to go beyond 'human' geography to embrace a more-than-human geography, a geography of co-becoming. Keywordsattending, ethics, geographies of care, Indigenous methodology, methodology, more-thanhuman, relational ontology cultural geographies 22 (2) Country communicates with us humans (and other more-than-humans), how it informs what we do and guides our thinking and doing. We do this by taking you night fishing -showing you how Bawaka communicates and in doing so shapes our methodology of attending and ethics of caring.
We invite readers to dig for ganguri (yams) at and with Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern Australia, and, in doing so, consider an Indigenous-led understanding of relational space/place. We draw on the concept of gurrutu to illustrate the limits of western ontologies, open up possibilities for other ways of thinking and theorizing, and give detail and depth to the notion of space/place as emergent co-becoming. With Bawaka as lead author, we look to Country for what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated, and for the insights it offers about co-becoming in a relational world.
In this paper, we engage with the Goŋ Gurtha songspiral, shared on/by/with/as Bawaka Country in Yolŋu Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, to provide a basis for re-thinking responsibility in the context of ongoing Eurocentric colonising processes. Goŋ Gurtha encourages us to consider two key aspects of responsibility – response and ability. We argue that Yolŋu relational ontologies conceive response-abilities as requiring an ability to pay close and careful attention as part of more-than-human worlds, and an imperative to respond as part of these worlds. As such, rather than being responsible to or for others, we seek to respond as, emphasising our emergent co-becoming in more-than-human, situated, ethical ways. Goŋ Gurtha guides the paper through four aspects of these response-abilities: response-abilities as songspirals; response-abilities as continuity; response-abilities as academics and response-abilities beyond Bawaka. In doing so, we understand response-abilities as more-than-human co-becomings enacted in contingent ways that none-the-less need to be grounded in deep obligations of more-than-human kinship.
This piece explores the work and entanglements of our research collective, formed in 2016. First, we collectively articulate the ethos and the motivations that inform the ways in which we labor to engage with complex, plural, multi-vocal experiences of extinction, “the Anthropocene,” and earth violence as they are felt and known across the diverse communities we represent. Then, drawing on more than three years of work across relations that tie us to Australia, Canada, Malaysian Borneo, the Philippines, and the United States of America, we share reflections on some of the vital relationships, methods, and “creatures” that animate our collaboration. This collection of “manifestings” aims to show how we work, very consciously, to foster more-than-human capacities for confronting the multi-scalar, cross-cosmological forms of violence that drive extinction and other forms of ecological harm in the world today.
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