Meeting of the Waters: Death and the Global Materialities of Litter

• In Event: Wild Thinking With Water: Dreams and Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, two researchers from Tennessee, USA and New South Wales, Australia think wildly with water. ‘Wild ideas’ (Thrift, 2008) happen in the encounter between philosophy and social sciences when complex questions invite the world to speak back and take part in the production of possible futures.

Theory
The paper is situated within the burgeoning Anthropocene scholarship informed by new materialism (Barad, 2007), staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2008), and climate changes’ necessity for new figures of human and new concepts of thought (Colebrook, 2012). We connect these philosophical contributions to the move towards postqualitative inquiry in educational research (St Pierre & Lather, 2013). We do this from our own ‘particularities of cultures, times, and places’, stretching our thinking by exchanging images, thoughts and feelings across continents.


Methods
Our waters meet and we write with them, not about them. Our waters first met at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Following a session, we ate lunch together and shared photographs of our waters—the rivers, bays, puddles and ponds of our lives. We mused about how water animates our wild thinking and theorizing. To further our meetings of waters across continents and multiple waterways, we created an online folder of images and movies. Since that time, our waters have continued to meet and flow together across space and time.

Data
Through lengthy emails, photographs, and videos we think wildly with water. Each email, photograph, and video creates currents of thought. We share scholarly and scientific articles about water. We write with water allowing it to send us through movements over pebbles and rocks. A shared sun moves through our water and diffracts our visions. Spectral images announce themselves in the water and ask that we speak with them. These untimely and incipient images write us as we write them and as we work toward a justice to come that is beyond the living present. We write and are written in water’s accessible language, images, and movies.

Results
We select two examples of uncanny connections in our Meeting of Waters, an affective connection around death and dying with rivers, and a material connection in relation to the global materialities of litter. The first addresses the question of the existence of the human I, the power of water, and the meaning of human life in a time of mass extinctions (Rose, van Dooren & Crulew, 2017; van Dooren, 2011; 2014). The second explores the wicked problem of litter connecting through a recent study of plastics on Hendersen Island, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, which has been found to have more concentration of plastic than any other surface on earth (Cooper, 2017). The plastic can be sourced to every country in the world and in this section of the paper we explore dreams and possibilities for thinking with the global materialities of litter in this halfway place between our two continents.

Significance
This work contributes to opening up the possibilities for qualitative inquiry in the great Anthropocene transition.

Authors

• Susan Naomi Nordstrom, The University of Memphis

• Margaret Jean Somerville, University of Western Sydney