Professor Sarah Wright

How might deeply embodied student experiences and nonhuman agency change the way we think about learning theory? Pushing the conceptual boundaries of practice-based learning and communities of practice, this chapter draws on student experiential fieldwork 'on Country' with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia, to explore the peculiar silence when it comes to more-than-human1 features of situated learning models. As students engage with, and learn from, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, they become open to the ways their learning is co-produced in and with place. The chapter builds a case for an inclusive conceptualisation of communities of practice, one that takes seriously the material performativity of nonhuman actors - rock art, animals, plants and emotions in the 'situatedness' of socio-cultural contexts. As a co-participant in the students' community of practice, the more-than-human forms part of the process of identity formation and actively helps students learn. To shed light on the student experiences we employ Leximancer, a software tool that provides visual representations of the qualitative data drawn from focus groups with students and field diaries. Copyright © 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.¿s (2018) ¿The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue¿ (Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109¿123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ¿rationally¿ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ¿voice¿ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67¿80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

A diversity of place-based community economic practices that enact ethical interdependence has long enabled livelihoods in Monsoon Asia. Managed either democratically or coercively, these culturally inflected practices have survived the rise of a cash economy, albeit in modified form, sometimes being co-opted to state projects. In the modern development imaginary, these practices have been positioned as ¿traditional¿, ¿rural¿ and largely superseded. But if we read against the grain of modernisation, a largely hidden geography of community economic practices emerges. This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place-based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William¿s cultural analysis of keywords into a non-western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. The paper has been collaboratively written with co-researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post-development agenda.

The Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, India, home to 3.4 million smallholder farmers, is a major cotton-producing region in one of the wealthiest Indian states. However, between 1995 and 2013, more than 60,000 farmers took their own lives. Many of these suicides have been linked to extreme debt created by the expensive mono-cropping of Bt cotton. Some farming households have responded to these pressures by abandoning Bt cotton growing and turning to sustainable agriculture using traditional mixedcropping methods. Yet the question remains: have the changes produced better livelihoods in Vidarbha? Using a food sovereignty framework, we assess the impact of these changes through an analysis of a 200-household survey across six districts in Vidarbha. We also explore the meaning of food sovereignty for those who practise it, seeking to better understand some of the complexities and experiences associated with the term.

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.

This paper investigates the writing of situated knowledge and explores the possibilities of enacting difference by writing differently. We present a selection of research stories in which carrier bags, sounds, baskets, gardens and potatoes are interpreted less as objects of research or metaphors to aid in analysing phenomena, than as mediators of the stories. Our stories emphasise the ontological politics of engaging with and representing the relational, the messy, the spontaneous, the unpredictable, the non-human and bodily experiences. These stories demonstrate how writing is performative and how it is integral to the production of knowledge.

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, co-constitutive 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 Yol¿u 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-than-human 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.