Exploring the Unknown.
Dartmouth, UK 5.2024
Last month, I attended a thoughtfully curated course, Moving Ecologies, at Schumacher College. Situated amidst the beautiful landscapes and coastlines of Devon in England, it is a precious and stimulating space where students of all ages can join in collective learning about the different ways we can encounter the more-than-human world. As the college’s founder, Satish Kumar, famously stated: we are an integral part of nature. While the teachings situate themselves elegantly within known traditions such as deep ecology, post-humanism, eco-femimism, and Gaia theory, the pedagogy is by no means citational as all courses incorporate a healthy degree of embodied learning and movement-based practices. As such, it formed a crucial stepping stone in the trajectory that I have started to carve out now that my decade-long, doctoral project has come to a fruitful conclusion with the culmination of my first book, Unthinking Epistemicide. The goal herein is not merely to start a new research project but to fundamentally rethink what research means and how it can be understood differently by removing the artificial wedge between scholarly output and personal inquiry into ourselves and the world around us. Are we really meant to stay in the same structures of inquiry, following the same codified methodologies and pedagogies of knowledge dissemination, and continue the fetishisation of disembodied ways of knowing the world? I hope not.
While I am still unpacking my experiences on both a personal and professional level (for as long as this artificial binary can be maintained), I have taken some steps to put down my thoughts, reflections, and plans in various forms. This has involved a lot of writing and photography but also digesting knowledge through movement. The latter has mostly involved running but has also opened up other, creative forms of movement such as dance and (a tentative interest in) Qigong. While all of this is still mostly fermenting in the non-verbal stage, I have decided to put the more scholarly ideas on paper, thereby helping me to commit more explicitly to what I would like to be exposed to intellectually and experientially in the following years. This is enshrined in a project called Exploring the Unknown: Ecology, Embodiment, and Movement and it consists of three, interconnected landscapes of inquiry, as the subtitles suggest. Specifically, I have explored these in a little more detail in the ‘Projects’ section above but the main idea is that it concerns explorations of the more-than-human world that seek to experience the unknown through embodiment and movement without collapsing this experience into conceptual rigidity. I am well aware that it may seem like a contradiction to undertake such an esoteric project through and within the scientific context of academic practices and discourses yet I welcome this challenge as it allows me to further probe the insubstantial boundaries of academic inquiry as well as situate my professional commitments more firmly within my personal examination of the world.
From the more embodied side of my inquisitive spectrum, I am interested to further explore what running can mean as an embodied practice. This is partially enshrined within one element of the project, Running as Knowledge in Motion, but it also seeks to experience somatically that which cannot be appropriated by academic inquiry: the very act of running itself. While I continue to digest a rather traditional diet of running that consists of training for road races and frequent supplements of trail running in Belgium and Scotland, I am also keen to experience what running can mean when it is no longer implicitly understood as disembodied performance. I realise that this may sound as yet another contradiction: improving my performance by running races while criticising the assumption of performativity as a foundational metric of running. However, I believe that these two ideas complement each other organically. Running races brings me - through an openness towards discomfort - closer to the limits of my own body, thereby giving me a vivid experience of what embodiment can mean in a direct sense. Yet this is itself embedded in a broader notion of running as movement through space. As an illustration of this, I recently embarked on a weekend of fast packing: running with very light and essential gear so as to be able to cover longer distances for multiple days. The setting for this was the Belgian province of Namur and conditions were, as can be expected in Belgium, wet and wet. But in sleeping under a bivy in the dark forest, waking up to the dawn chorus of robins, blackbirds, and song thrushes, and wading knee-deep through submerged trails, I experienced a sense of being and movement that is still hard to put into words. It felt - and continue to feel through my fading recollection - that any attempt to verbalise this kind of experience would simply undo the profound nature the experience itself.
Yet I know that I want to continue exploring these experiences further in my work as a researcher as well as a runner. So the abovementioned project is as much a new strand of research as well as a new way of doing research altogether. Research - understood as the pursuit of a question by means of interrogation, examination, and reflection - is not meant to be a detached and bifurcated activity that is separate from the rest of our lives. It moves with us as we learn, grow, and develop and therefore constitutes an integral part of our being in the world. Research and running are, for me, ways of inhabiting a world and exploring what it means to be human. They are ways in which humans have sought to live an examined life in relation to the more-than-human world. Yet the practices that I have developed are by no means exclusive. Human phenomenology of the environment has delivered a range of spiritual practices, creative tools, political activities, embodied discourses, and cultural traditions that seek to express what it means to be human as being part of the natural world without collapsing this into simplistic and anthropocentric answers. Like poetry, it concerns an effort to put into words what which lies beyond the realm of words. These are of course ambitious claims when embarking on a quest to literally encounter the unknown. It may very well lead me into landscapes that are far removed from what the project currently seeks to entail. This is too then, part of the joy and challenge of both research and running: embarking on a journey that changes as one changes with it.