Contribution short abstract

Reflecting on post-wildfire research on unceded Nlaka’pamux territory, this paper shows how participant-led, trauma-informed heuristic phenomenology turns positionality into a methodological engine while exposing limits of decolonial aspirations in political ecology.

Contribution long abstract

This paper reflects on doing political ecology as a non-Indigenous, migrant researcher working on unceded Nlaka’pamux territory after the 2021 Lytton Creek Fire in British Columbia, Canada, and asks how heuristic, phenomenological and trauma-informed methods can operationalize positionality in a study that is informed by, but does not claim to be, decolonial. Drawing on the author’s doctoral project Charred Chronicles, the paper outlines a research design that combines participant-led walking interviews, photo-elicitation and conceptual mapping with in-depth reflective sessions in which residents choose where to walk, what to photograph and how to narrate altered home landscapes. These multimodal encounters are structured through trauma-informed protocols and ongoing consent, redistributing control over what counts as data and when to pause, withhold or withdraw. Heuristic inquiry requires the researcher to weave their own history of disaster, migration and homesickness into the analytic process rather than treat “field” and “researcher” as separate, surfacing tensions between institutional ethics, Indigenous data governance and community expectations of care. The presentation analyses two fieldwork vignettes, a participant-led drive through the burn scar and the co-creation and later withdrawal of a photo narrative, to show how consent, silence and representation are negotiated and how epistemic authority is continually repositioned. The paper argues that participant-controlled, trauma-informed heuristic inquiry turns positionality into the central methodological engine of the project, while simultaneously revealing the limits of decolonial aspirations within Global North research infrastructures, and proposes this ambivalence as a productive starting point for re-politicizing place-based political ecology.