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Contribution short abstract:

My interest in more-than-human archives stems from my research amid lively and elemental 'riverscape archives'.

Contribution long abstract:

My work has focused on cultures and knowledges around dynamic waterscapes in the Anthropocene. My PhD problematised Western academic ways of knowing rivers; Focusing on riverscapes across the Scottish Highlands and Northern Finland, I explored the rationales and sensibilities of light-animated environmental sensing technologies, and produced perspectives on how luminous modes of wit(h)nessing riverscapes permit particular riverine knowledges and archives to emerge and do work in the world, and for the ‘voice of the river’ (Brierley 2020) to be heard. Here, the notion of an elemental 'riverscape archive' (informed both by geoscience and feminist new materialism) emerged as a key mode for enquiry. I approached the riverscape archive as a contested and lively space, a constellation of past and present made through complex ecologies of light. I explored how our practices of knowing take place within it, articulating and configuring it in particular ways. My entanglement within the riverine archive invited reflection on the ways in which ‘knowing’ emerges as a broader cognitive function, distributed between the participating elements - and how riverine knowledges are relational and partial utterances of the elemental riverscape archive.

I understand the more-than-human archive as an elemental and lively space that encompasses both worldly matter in motion and knowledge-making practices within. I would be keen explore the topic further through this collaborative workshop. As an archival object, I will bring a solargraph image produced during my PhD research, which itself acts as an archive of cosmic and riverine radiations.