Sarah Whatmore has argued that ' [t]here is an urgent need to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject'. But how does one do this? What kinds of research practices are useful? And more specifically, what kinds of methods can help to conjure and enact a vitalist materialism in the field? This essay offers a brief and critical account of how the author attempted to perform a vitalist materialism through fieldwork practices undertaken in 2007. Research into Caribbean agronomic responses to the EU Sugar Reform involved 'muddy boots', diary writing, and video documentation methods. Participating in the thick of agronomic experiments facilitated a greater sensitivity to and awareness of the interactions and miscommunications involved between different vital agencies and video provided an evocative way of communicating more-than-human materialities. In sum, these methods were successful with regard to Whatmore's call, but proved to be more useful as memory-prompting tools. This author found that practising vitalist fieldwork did not mean that one had to enrol fantastical new methods to reveal or get at 'the vital'. Rather, the cultivation of a vitalist geographical imagination that was receptive and open to the liveliness of materialities and the significance of relational becomings was much more important.

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Permaculture is an approach to sustainable design thinking, agriculture, and community, as well as a globalized movement. This article explores how different practices and processes of permaculture have generated different political registers of “community,” at three permaculture sites in Zimbabwe. Speaking to recent online media that asks “Is permaculture political?,” as well as to the academic literature critiquing localized environmental initiatives as “postpolitical,” the article adopts a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework to discuss two modalities in which the geographies of community‐building can be registered as political. First, I look at how subjectivities and intracommunity power relations have been reshaped through participatory practices of governance, taking on entrenched gender‐ and age‐based power relations in particular. Second, comes the idea of community as a more‐than‐human ontology. An FPE analysis offers an original perspective on how permaculture has become actualized in the Zimbabwean context. The research approach built on Gibson‐Graham's calls to engage performatively with examples of diverse economies and aimed to serve the efforts of these communities in a small way, by celebrating and documenting their activities and creating public media outputs. Contributing to the literature on permaculture, as well as to debates around community‐based environmental movements, an FPE perspective frames these community‐building efforts in terms of everyday political practices and performances. I conclude that while FPE draws attention to these everyday politics, permaculture practitioners actualize them and in doing so, make a much‐needed contribution to cultivating, or “worlding” diverse, more‐than‐human economies.

This paper draws inspiration from an elderly sugarcane farmer in Barbados, Mr Thompson, who took part in a participatory video (PV) project and informal life history interviews with the author in 2007. The author mobilises Mr Thompson's life history as a situated account of the influence of the European Union (EU) sugar regime, considering how this trade regime and the local state‐owned sugar industry have been implicated in his life. It is demonstrated how Europe's wide‐reaching trade agenda is embodied in both the life history and the living present of a particular individual. Tracing the story of Mr Thompson, the paper draws heavily on his own words and audio‐visual presentations. From these video‐based expressions, we glimpse relations between a personal history, a set of embodied encounters and a broader (post)colonial legacy. Mr Thompson evokes an alternative understanding of sugar in Barbados, acting as a counterpoint to claims that promote neoliberal reform. Charting the experiences of one person, the paper suggests, offers a useful and valid position from which to critique the EU sugar reform at large. Finally, the paper discusses how a methodological coupling of PV and life history interviewing provided a valuable tool for engaging with and expressing situated knowledges.