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ABSTRACT
This essay describes the influence of tides and touch on collaborative fieldwork as a practice of care. I draw from collaborations with clamming communities and connect a history of fieldwork with longstanding commitments within environmental communication to use rhetorical fieldwork as a means of witnessing crises and practicing care. This collaborative fieldwork was also shaped by connecting with Édouard Glissant’s critique of knowledge and his poetics of relation as alternative praxis for making knowledge through errant, tidal movements, and touch. I describe how these influences on fieldwork created the context for an evolving digital media effort that has figured how we stay in touch and practice listening to partners and with tides through time.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Pezzullo and de Onís (Citation2018, pp. 103–106) reference key articles and influences in this history.
2 For example, see Druschke (Citation2013), Milstein (Citation2011), Na’puti (Citation2019), and de Onís (Citation2021) for fieldwork-based approaches to engaging with water.
3 See also Morrison (Citation1990, p. 305); “Underheard” draws from Pezzullo and de Onís (Citation2018, p. 105).
4 Geo Soctomah Neptune (Niskapisuwin Nil) is a Two-Spirit Passamaquoddy basket maker, artist, and educator. This layered approach to naming Maine as Dawnland responds to Na’puti’s call to challenge “colonial cartographic violence” in mapping by destabilizing “continental, static, and landcentric vocabularies to instead theorize fluid, shifting, interconnections among land and water,” in Na’puti (Citation2019, p. 3).
5 See Silva (Citation2022, pp. 59–60) for how practices of determinacy and categorization racialize knowledge.
6 Bonnie Newsom is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine. This article describes both her research on shell heaps as well as Wabanaki perspectives about collaborative fieldwork as a practice of “wicuhketuwakonol,” or the shared responsibilities for care and good relations.
7 Gumbs asks this question in the preface (1). The title of the first chapter is “Listen” (15) followed by “Breathe” (21).
8 Glissant (Citation1997a), see “The Open Boat,” pp. 5–9.
9 See also Communicating Care, https://communicatingcare.buzzsprout.com/.
10 See also Cordes, “Storying on the Coquille River,” https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3678bc6932c74332b0d57adf3434aa55.
11 Translation of “tissu du vivant,” Glissant (Citation2009, p. 29).
12 We are describing these efforts in a book project and have shared parts of this work in McGreavy et al. (Citation2022), on TheMudflat.org, and in Hillyer (Citation2023).