I’ve put aside my exploration of walkability for the time being, because I’ve received readers’ reports on an article I’ve submitted for publication, and one of the readers suggests that I need to read Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, a collaboration between Unangan education scholar Eve Tuck and settler environmental education professor Marcia McKenzie. That essay has been accepted, but I want to be scholarly, and if Place in Research could be useful, then I need to take a look at it, don’t I? I know I skimmed this book while I was working on my MFA—some pages are dogeared, and there’s a scrap of paper serving as a bookmark—but I have no recollection of its argument, perhaps because I wasn’t writing these detailed summaries back then, so I’m going to reread it in hopes that it’s useful for my research in general, and that essay in particular. Plus, I just found out that it’s the primary text in a three-week intensive course I’m taking—which starts next week—so in academic terms I’m way behind. There are two books to read for this course, and that’s a lot, given that it’ll be over before it begins. I’ll start the second one tomorrow; the first, Place as Research, I finished this afternoon.

The co-authors begin with Indigenous notions about place. In the “Preface,” they describe the intentions of the book as seeking “to draw attention to the multidimensional significance of place(s) in social science research,” not just as symbols of the past but also “as sites of presence, futurity, imagination, power, and knowing” (xiv). “This is an important time to write about place, not just because social science, in general practice, doesn’t give place its due, but because we write from and into the overlapping contexts of globalization and neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation,” they continue (xiv). Such practices and contexts are, they argue, citing Kim Tallbear, “coproduced, meaning science and society are actively entangled with each other,” and that they are “mutually constitutive,” reinforcing and/or disrupting each other (xiv). “Coproduction of practices of social science, globalization and neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation comprises both the barrier and the possibility to making the changes needed for the sustainability of (human) life on the planet,” they continue (xiv-xv). The land may decolonize itself, “even if humans are too deluded or delayed to make their own needed changes” (xv).

The co-authors met at a conference planning meeting in 2009, where they objected to the use of terms like “complex ecologies” as metaphors without any references to actual ecologies (xv). They organized a conference session on “demetaphorizing complex ecologies,” where “speakers from the distinct trajectories of environmental and Indigenous scholarship mobilized contradictory language and understandings in their panel presentations,” they recall. “The worldviews, epistemologies, and lexicons mobilized by environmental scholars and Indigenous scholars were not only contradictory, but perhaps even incommensurable” (xv). They suggest that two perspectives emerged from the panel, both of which seemed to wrestle with “the same notion of the inseparability of humans with nature” (xv-xvi). One, advanced by Indigenous scholars, held that “Indigenous peoples have always had relationships to land that are distinct and sovereign from relationships imposed by settlers” (xvi). That perspective “emphasized a recognition of the inseparability of humans and nature as concomitant with Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies” (xvi). The other perspective, expressed by environmental scholars, was that “more ethical and respectful relationships of humans to place” was necessary to stop environmental degradation (xvi). That perspective, however, ignored “the claims of Indigenous peoples to have prior, intact relationships to their land,” and “instead seemed to desire to form new relationships to the very same territory, without recognition of those prior claims” (xvi). At another session at another conference a few years later, the panelists discussed those incommensurable perspectives more explicitly in papers which “pointed to the ways in which social sciences, when not cognizant of settler colonial structures, can replicate some of the epistemic violences of settler colonialism and exhibit some of the tendencies of that structure to accumulate at all costs” (xvi). The co-authors have become more aware of the ways that environmental research in the social sciences “continues to be mired in assumptions and practices that perpetuate forms of colonialism and racism, despite well-meaning intentions to the contrary” (xvi).

Environmental and Indigenous concerns are entwined, but “there has been little discussion across these domains in academia,” and where such discussions take place, they tend to be “situated within historical blank spots and systemic oppression,” so that “those working in these areas do not always effectively hear one another” (xvi-xvii). The hope of the two co-authors is that “the discussions of this book will help contribute to broader engagement of the possibilities for collaborations and valuable incommensurabilities across these domains and their importance for considering place in social science research” (xvii). They also hope the book leads to research that better addresses place, which is “one part of what is needed to redress the consequences of colonialism and enable the sustainability of (human) life on the planet” (xvii).

The book’s first chapter functions as an introduction. The co-authors suggest that social science research is always situated in places, and that therefore “research in the social sciences is always concerned with epistemologies, questions, and methods that impact place and land, and the human and natural communities that inhabit them,” even if that reality has tended to be ignored (1). While there is a renewed interest in the idea of place in the social sciences, something “evident both in the increased attention to decolonizing research and Indigenous methodologies” and “in relation to ‘spatial’ and ‘material’ turns in the social sciences more broadly” (1). “This book seeks to develop complex and historicized orientations to place in research through providing social science researchers with rationales, discourses, examples, and methods of critical place inquiry,” a term the co-authors define as “research that more fully considers the implications and significance of place in lived lives” (1). The book also advocates “for theoretically and ethically responsive research in the context of the globalization of the planet, its populations, and places” (1-2). The introduction will “elaborate theorizations and practices of critical place inquiry in the social sciences”: “research that takes up critical questions and develops corresponding methodological approaches that are informed by the embeddedness of social life and with places, and that seeks to be a form of action in responding to critical place issues such as those of globalization and neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation” (2). They will explain how place is used “conceptually and empirically” in social science research, methodologies and methods used to examine place, and the “ethical and political implications and possibilities” of critical place research as “public scholarship” (2). Why it must be public scholarship—which I take to mean scholarship that is widely disseminated, rather than circulating in academic journals—is not yet clear, but that notion might be useful in drawing an analogy between social science research and artistic practices. Drawing an analogy is probably the best one can do, because the social sciences works with different methodologies and under different conditions and restrictions than art does: the contexts of both activities is completely different, and that might be one reason I put this book down when I tried to read it three or four years ago.

The point, Tuck and McKenzie continue, is that thinking about place matters “because it enables greater attention to the ways in which land and environmental issues intersect with social issues and social life” (2). They list a series of “interwoven social and environmental forms of injustice” that “have been created by long histories of hierarchical divisions among peoples, to other species, to the land” which are examples of intersections between land and environmental issues, on the one hand, and social issues on the other (2-3). 

Next, they define neoliberalism as the “currently dominant global and globalizing governance systems” which “promotes ‘free-market’ conditions that prioritize corporations and economic growth over considerations of social equity and environmental protection” (3). Neoliberalism emphasizes privatization, public-sector austerity, tax cuts, and reduced regulations (3). It is “a current formation of capitalism and Empire, which is the reliance of territory on the natural environment to fuel unsustainable and colonialist encounters” (3). “Empire” must be capitalized in allusion to some body of thought, but I don’t know what that body of thought might be. Maybe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri? I think so but I’m not sure. I’m certain it’s not a typo, however.

The co-authors suggest that the relationship “between capitalism and the biophysical” tends to be left out of discussions of political systems in relation to land (3). The “biophysical world” seems to be a way of speaking about the natural world; the extraction of resources from that world fuels our economy (3-4). However, most discussions of neoliberalism leave out capitalism’s reliance on the biophysical and the resulting environmental damage (4). In addition, “the historical and ongoing land-based practices of colonialism and, in particular, settler colonialism” are also left out of the picture (4). That history involves an ongoing process of establishing and reifying “hierarchies of settler over Indigenous” (4). The co-authors state that they will draw on scholarship about settler colonialism “to problematize settler relations to land as they affect Indigenous peoples, land, and other life forms, including as linked to current environmental devastation and curtailed possibilities for future generations” (4). “Settler and colonial futurities based on expansionist, capitalist, and racist assumptions necessitate practices of decolonization in order to re-prioritize Indigenous and land-based futurities” (4). As always, a definition of the word “futurity” would be helpful here, although this sentence is a little clearer than Tuck’s famous article on decolonization and metaphor (co-authored with K. Wayne Yang).

This book addresses those absences in the social sciences, highlighting research that elaborates and addresses “the embeddedness of social life, including economic policy, with land and environment” (5). Here they cite scholars such as Doreen Massey (whose work I’ve written about here) and Jodi Byrd (whose work I should’ve written about here, but I’ve only skimmed it). They suggest that this research theorizes place, and they use it “to advocate for greater consideration of place in social science research” (5). The book’s approach “is uncommon because it seeks to bring decolonizing Indigenous studies, environmental scholarship, and related critical areas concerned with place into conversation with one another,” despite the distinct epistemologies, discourses, and practices of those bodies of knowledge (5). “There are often important divergences and even competing logics at work in these areas of research, some that may indeed be incommensurable,” they state. “This book brings these areas into conversation, without papering over differences, but also without maintaining false dichotomies” (5). Instead, they “bridge these and related domains to examine place in social science research, and in doing so, define and contribute to the emerging area of critical place inquiry” by offering “cross-disciplinary insight into how researchers around the globe are theoretically and empirically engaging, or re-engaging, place in social science research” (5). They map the emergence of critical place inquiry, mark the historical, economic, colonial, and ecological conditions necessitating that inquiry, offer new methodological directions, and highlight research that informs “how one can understand and inhabit place through research,” thereby thinking about “the why, what, and how of developing critical place research in the social sciences” (5).

Place is a complex concept, and it’s most often defined in relation to space (6). Space tends to be seen as a dimension within which things are located or contained (6). In the Newtonian philosophical tradition, “space is concrete, and indeed it is this concreteness that makes it real” (6). In contrast, in the Leibnizian conceptualization, “space is relational and dependent, holding no powers itself” (6). It is active yet depends on relations between objects occupying places (6). If that’s not clear to you, don’t worry; it’s not clear to me, either. I would’ve expected them to begin with Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between place and space, but although it’s in the book’s bibliography, it must appear at a later point. (It does, in passing.) The co-authors suggest that Donna Haraway updates the Leibnizian version of space, extending it as “dynamic, interactive, indeed, as a process” (6). That reminds me of Doreen Massey’s book on space, but strangely Tuck and McKenzie mention it in relation to place on the previous page. 

Place, on the other hand, typically conveys geographic meaning (6-7). Place is usually specific (7). The term went through a revival in the 1970s and 1980s in which the connection between place and social relations, and place and meaning-making, was explored (7). At the same time, though “theorizations of identity and globalization have led to critiques of terminology and theorizations of place in social research” (7). “Considering the ways in which factors such as gender, racialization, nationality, or access to financial or technological resources affects people’s access to, mobility across, and experiences of place, some scholars have suggested that the defining of places is problematic,” Tuck and McKenzie note (7). Some arguments contend that the world is become placeless because of technology and rapid transportation (7). Writing about place thus becomes quaint or archaic (8). “Thus, theorists and researchers attendant to issues of space and place must work against the seemingly common-sense conclusions of popular analyses of globalization, which, not operating from a complex conceptualization of space and place, attempt to foretell the end of place,” Tuck and McKenzie write (8). 

Place is often—usually, even—“superficially addressed in social science inquiry,” which pays little attention to where things happen (8)—except in geography, I would think, which is a social science. “Thus, in much social science research, place is just the surface upon which life happens (and from which data are collected),” they suggest (9). It’s a backdrop, rarely examined in detail (9). Place is “on the periphery” of such research, not part of the analysis or “considered in terms of the specifics of research methodology or methods” (9). Relying on notions of space and place that have changed little since the seventeenth century “has implications for the richness of theories of space and place engaged in social science research, but also for how the relationships between space and place are usually understood” (9). 

Next, Tuck and McKenzie discuss the various “turns” in recent social science research, beginning with the increasing influence of Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives and methodologies (9).They cite Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Shawn Wilson, among others, as examples (9-10). “Looking to Indigenous languages helps to demonstrate the differences between understandings of space and place (and time) that exist between Western/colonial frameworks and Indigenous knowledge systems,” they state, citing Tuhiwai Smith’s suggestion that in Maori the word for time or space is the same, but in Western philosophies space is separated from time (10). For Tuhiwai Smith, this distinction is important, because colonialism involves “processes of marking, defining, and controlling space” through the figures of the line, the centre, and the outside (10-11). For Tuck and McKenzie, “one major outgrowth of the increased attention to Indigenous perspectives and methodologies in academic discourse is the recognition that alternative, long-held, comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated understandings of place exist outside, alongside, against, and within the domain of the Western philosophical tradition” (11). These understandings are often framed in terms of “land,” and they “derive from entirely different epistemological and cosmological foundations” which prevent them from being easily absorbed into Western ideas: “They come from, and go to, a different place” (11). That doesn’t mean Indigenous ideas about land are pristine, devoid of Western influence, or even that keeping Indigenous theories separate from colonial or settler influences is possible or desirable (11). “But the persistence/existence of Indigenous theorizations and methodologies of land serve as a rejoinder to Western theorizations of place, to mark how theories of the West have also been shaped by its colonial and settler histories and current pursuits,” Tuck and McKenzie state (11). All of this gets clearer later in the book.

In addition, decolonizing perspectives, which are informed by Indigenous theories, “seek to undo the real and symbolic violences of colonialism” (11). “Decolonization is determined to thwart colonial apparatuses, recover Indigenous land and life, and shape a new structure and future for all life,” Tuck and McKenzie write (11). Decolonization “requires unique theories and enactments across sites,” they continue, suggesting that it is always specific to time, place, and context (11). It is always about land (11).

Next Tuck and McKenzie discuss the spatial turn in social sciences. The spatial turn, according to Edward Soja, is likely to change profoundly “all aspects of inquiry, including ontological and epistemological considerations, theory formation, empirical research, and applied knowledge” (12). They cite Doreen Massey’s insistence that “how we imagine space has consequences: seeing space as commensurate with voyages and discovery, as something to be traversed, as the same as the land and ocean, as a surface, as a given, will have ramifications” (12-13). (I need to reread Massey’s book.) If, for instance, we think of space as a neutral place upon which human life takes place, “it becomes possible to view other variations of human life as simply phenomena atop this benign surface; this may not at first appear to be problematic, but it is insofar as phenomena on the surface may be seen to be waiting to be discovered, conquered, but also managed, exploited, rescued, pathologized” (13). 

Globalization, according to Massey, turns space into time and geography into history: therefore, contemporary analyses of space need to refuse those shifts (13). Massey contends that space is constituted through interactions; space and multiplicity require each other; and space is always under construction (13). Tuck and McKenzie praise the “conceptual moves” Massey makes, including the notion of geographies of care (13). Space, according to Massey, presents us with the “challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness,” “the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and nonhuman,” and “the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured” (qtd. 13). 

Nevertheless, the spatial turn offers “problematic characterizations of space” (13). In some cases, the contrast between space and place is not clearly articulated: “Places are not always named, and not always justly named. They do not always appear on maps; they do not have agreed-upon boundaries. They are not fixed. Places are not readily understood by objective accounts. Finally and most importantly, places have practices. In some definitions, places are practices” (14). This list of the characteristics of place seems to align it with Massey’s notion of space, and I’m not sure how to untangle them. I’d have to return to Massey’s book, which I don’t have time to do right now—maybe later this summer.

Next, Tuck and McKenzie discuss the new materialist or ontological turn in the social sciences (14). This is a body of work I know little about but, from what I’ve heard at conferences, sounds promising for my research. It also seems like an overwhelming group of texts, the subject of an entire dissertation, not just a small corner of a theoretical exegesis. The new materialist turn emphasizes bodies rather than language, and is thus a reaction against poststructuralism (14). Most of the authors considered under this rubric “gather place or land into broader categorizations of actors of objects that are viewed as also influencing and influenced by social life (e.g., technology, institutions, animals, other humans)” (14). It is interdisciplinary, partly because of the influence of feminism, and it seems to focus on spatialization—at least according to the quotation from Karen Barad that’s offered as a definition of the new materialism’s spatialization project (15). New materialism is dynamic and interested in material and immaterial things (15). It turns away from subjectivity, calling “for a reappraisal of material reality, material causality, and the significance of corporeality” (15). It is interested in cartography rather than classification (16). Tuck and McKenzie approve of Barad’s suggestion that “topological questions of boundary, connectivity, interiority, and exteriority” are more important than geometrical considerations of space (16), which are reductive and see space as a mere surface (17). “Yet, Barad dismisses the entirety of discussions of space and place as though all of them adhere to geometrical constructions,” they continue. “Thus, we take Barad’s critique of geometrical constructions of space seriously, but are not yet willing to cede the notions of place and land for topology” (17).

“The increasing influence of Indigenous and decolonizing scholarship, spatial theories, and new materialism on the theories, methodologies, and methods of social science cannot be disputed,” Tuck and McKenzie write (17). However, that influence has not led to “a more robust discussion of place” (17). “In many cases, flattened ontological or materialist frameworks de-emphasize the agency of people and politics in attempting to better attend to the interconnected ‘networks’ or ‘mangles’ of practice in researching social life,” and “the spatial turn has emphasized global flows of people, information, and people” while “turning away from a focus on place in theoretical or empirical study” (17). “In contrast, Indigenous intellectual contributions rarely fail to engage in issues of land and place—especially via conceptualizations of tribal identity, sovereignty, and treaty rights—yet when these discussions are taken up by non-Indigenous and settler scholars, the salience of land/place is frequently left out of the picture” (17).

Therefore, Tuck and McKenzie contend “that scholars influences by these turns often do not go far enough to attend to place. Although there are rich theorizations of place that throb at the center of each of these turns in social science, in their wider adoption and redaction, place gets reduced and reified” (17). Place ends up “shallow or emptied” (17). “The challenge is to get rich theorizations (and methodologies and methods) of place to travel within and alongside the adoption and adaptation of these turns, and other turns now forming and emerging,” they continue (17). They also warn against using metaphors of place, typically derived from Deleuze and Guattari, which “invoke place superficially, too easily” and do little “to attend more responsibly to issues of place” (18). 

In their definition of critical place inquiry, Tuck and McKenzie state that they “draw on the developments of postmodern, spatial, new materialist, and other ‘turns’ of the social sciences for their insights on the movement and relationality of place” (18). They contend, however, that “Indigenous methods are central and not peripheral to practices of critical place inquiry” (19). They provide a list of bullet points that describe critical place inquiry: it understands places as “mobile, shifting over time and space and through interactions with flows of people, other species, social practices”—a definition that sounds like Massey’s notion of space; it entails “understanding places as both influencing social practices as well as being performed and (re)shaped through practices and movements of individuals and collectives”; it understands “place as interactive and dynamic due to these time-space characteristics”; it recognizes “that disparate realities determine not only how place is experienced but how it is understood and practiced in turn”; it addresses “spatialized and place-based processes of colonization and settler colonization, and works against their further erasure or neutralization through social science research”; it goes past the social to understand more deeply “the land itself and its nonhuman inhabitants and characteristics as they determine and manifest place”; and, finally, it sets out “to further generative and critical politics of places through such conceptualizations/practices and via a relational ethics of accountability to people and place” (19). 

In the context of that definition, Tuck and McKenzie say that the goals of the book are to produce a cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion of theories, methodologies, and methods of place; to discuss the implications of theories of place for applied methodologies and methods; to take the conceptual and empirical contributions of Indigenous epistemologies seriously; and to argue for the importance of place over space (19-20). “Place is the setting for social rootedness and landscape continuity,” they write. “Location/space represents the transcending of the past by overcoming the rootedness of social relations and landscape in place through mobility and the increased similarity of everyday life from place to place” (20). However, it’s the specificity and rootedness of place that makes it important in social science and the human imagination (21). Place is always specific; it resists universalizations and generalizations. And, finally, “the environmental consequences of deluding ourselves into believing that place no longer matters are stark and creeping” (21).

The book’s second chapter is about conceptualizing place. It begins with Daniel Miller’s 2008 book The Comfort of Things, a study of 30 people living on the same street in south London. “We find Miller’s method, of studying a single street, to be quite compelling,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “We can see how this approach might inspire other works of social science across disciplines” (26). However, that “supposedly place-based method revealed little about the street itself” (26). They suggest that although social science research happens in a place, those places “rarely are heavily featured in the articles, reports, and books that emerge from those studies,” and they wonder why that’s the case (26). They suggest that social scientists consider place to be less important because of globalization (27). However, they contend that “globalization has made space and place more significant, not less” (28). They quote Neil Smith: “Geographical space is on the economic and political agenda as never before” (qtd. 28) and suggest that “(Western) theorists have struggled to make more evident the role of space in society, whereas capital seems to have achieved it in practice on a daily basis” (28). “Globalization, specifically its unevenness, makes considerations of place more important, not less,” they argue, even though “undertheorizations of place . . . dominate the popular and scholarly discourses on globalization” (28). “Such undertheorizations have stark consequences with regard to continued forms of colonial violence (e.g., the U.S.’s now frequent use of drone attacks orchestrated by soldiers holding video game controllers from another continent) and environmental violence (e.g., the destruction of earth and water through the extraction of bitumen from tar sands in Canada,” they state (28).

“Within the context of Smith’s discussions of the geographical imperatives of globalization, the remainder of this chapter examines considerations of reconceptualized and renewed understandings of place, as grounded and relational, and as providing roots for politics that are deeply specific to place and yet connected to other places,” Tuck and McKenzie continue. “These considerations are drawn from new and renewed trajectories of materialist and spatial scholarship; as well as from longer trajectories of decolonizing and Indigenous scholarship and practice” (29). They aren’t aiming for a coherent whole—“conceptualizations featured in this chapter overlap and juxtapose with each other,” they state (29)—but they are interested in how geographers and other social scientists think about space and place and in providing inspiration to readers (29). They mention, in particular, the work of Raewyn Connell, who distinguishes between “Northern theory” (coming out of the global, metropolitan north) and “Southern” theory, “developed in four locations where colonial relations have been challenged”: Africa, Iran, Latin America, and India (29). “Connell’s point regarding which theories are prioritized in social science, where they originate from, and what legacies are tied to those theories is a crucial one for critical place inquiry,” they contend. “The place-based theory, methodology, and methods of research one mobilizes require ongoing scrutiny for their inherent legacies and effects” (29). They are particularly interested in juxtaposing spatial theories, methodologies, and methods with Indigenous theories, methodologies, and methods in order “to formulate a description of the theoretical foundations of critical place inquiry that are accountable to Indigenous peoples and futurity” (29).

Globalization is making space and scale more important (29-30). Examples of this importance include mobility studies and research into “non-places” and diasporas (30). As a result, place has been understood “as a contrary alternative” (30). Sometimes engagements with place are seen as a way to remedy the spatial flows of globalization, and sometimes they are seen as “outdated or reactionary” (30). Doreen Massey is one of the few thinkers to have theorized place, Tuck and McKenzie suggest, and her work “is helpful in her critiques of the oversimplified division of space from place and in considering why and how ‘place’ is an important and useful framing for politics and thus for critical social science research” (30). They cite a 2009 interview with Massey where she “articulates an orientation to place that acknowledges the connections across local places and their influences on global circulations of knowledge and practice,” one that integrates space and place relationally (31). In her book on space, Massey argues that “places are themselves moving and changing over time, whether through connections with other places and the global or through physical processes, from shifting tectonic plates to climate change” (31). “Such a relational understanding of place to space, and of place to time, suggests the ways in which what we think of as particular ‘places’ can be understood as articulations of time-space, or the interweaving of history and geography,” they suggest (31). In this way, mobility is integral to place, since flows of technology or people or other species move through places, and the places themselves are also moving (31-32).

“Understanding place as lived space, meeting place, site of social reproduction, or personality suggests the variety of considerations of relationships between place and social practice, across disciplines and epistemological frames,” Tuck and McKenzie write, citing Soya, Massey, Katz, and Deloria and Wildcat (32). They suggest that “embodied and emplaced practices of movement, and stillness, are among the ways that place shapes us individually and collectively, and in turn, through which we shape and reshape place” (32). Nature and land are “ultra-connected to human life,” not external to it: “land with its physical features, climate, other species, and other aspects can act on and in conjunction with social histories and introduced influences to form current human practices of ritual and ceremony; architecture, planning, and design; educational traditions; and leisure pastimes” (32). Place influences social practice, and social practice influences place (32). The co-authors cite, among other writers, Michel de Certeau’s essay on urban walking as “relationally determined and guided by established rules” but also as a field for individual invention and improvisation (33). Stories, for de Certeau, are a way of making places as well (34). The work of Indigenous scholars also examines “the role of storytelling as a practice of shaping and being shaped by place among Indigenous peoples” and “the role that cosmology and cosmogony stories have placed in Indigenous conceptualizations of collective identity and place” (34). “Stories thus carry out a labor,” they write—they create, maintain, and change narratives about “the places in which we live and how they produce us and us them” (34). So they are using two of de Certeau’s essays—one on walking, and another on narrative. I’ve written about de Certeau’s work here, but I had forgotten his discussion of the differences between stories and maps; perhaps I need to refresh my memory.

Tuck and McKenzie cite the work of Tim Cresswell—the notion that place gives us a template for practice—and Tim Ingold—the idea that places occur, rather than exist—before turning to the new materialist notion that matter is productive (34-35). They note that “approaches that flatten human and non-human relations” and that “de-emphasize the politics of materiality” have been the subject of critique (35). For the co-authors, “performances and practices cannot exist outside of ‘extrinsic sources,’ such as cultural configurations of power and past colonial experiences” (35, citing Anderson and Harrison). For that reason, they turn to the relationship between power and place. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, for instance, “has critiqued colonial naming and mapping practices that have worked simultaneously to dispossess Indigenous peoples of land and establish settler colonial nation-states” (36). “Learning from this critique and from the notion of cartographies of struggle, we resist ontological analyses that, much like earlier phenomenological study, focus at the micro and yet universal level, while ignoring the situated realities of historical and spatial sedimentations of power,” they write (36). Instead, they “understand place as experienced differently based on culture, geography, gender, race, sexuality, age, or other identifications and experiences,” and those “disparate realities determine not only how place is experienced but also how it is understood and practiced in turn” (36). Such “place-specific differences do not amount only to ‘diversity,’ but rather in many cases exemplify and help establish forms of inequity, colonization, and other forms of oppression” (36).

Thus, the co-authors cite Katherine McKittrick’s contention that “geographies of domination” need to be understood as configuring hierarchies of “human and inhuman persons” and shows that those hierarchies “are critical categories of social and spatial struggle” (qtd. 37). “McKittrick does not allow for categories of body/identity/place to be regarded as separate,” they state. “Her work pushes us to see how practices of subjugation, including racism and sexism, are spatial acts and to consider effective ways of mapping them. Indeed, it may only be possible to see how racism and sexism are not bodily or identity based, but are spatial acts” (37). That is a radical statement. They suggest that the work of George Lipsitz (who argues that both Black disadvantages and unearned white privileges is necessary, and that white privilege is a form of spatialized and structural advantage) and Winona LaDuke’s discussion of environmental racism are examples of their argument (37-38). They also cite Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat on Indigenous ideas about power and place, where power cuts “toward those who have long-standing relationships with place(s) rather than those who purport to conquer them,” and Doreen Massey’s term “power geometries,” which discusses the inequalities of globalization (38). Within given places, “there are also more localized asymmetries of power and privilege, for example, in who can walk or travel safely in particular places based on identifications of race, gender, or sexuality” (38). “Individual and collective histories and memories of place also contribute in powerful ways to what is possible or not,” they continue (38). Access to places is unequal, but “some memoried accounts of place are explicitly impressed to the continued advantage of specific groups at the expense of others,” as in the case of Manifest Destiny in the United States, which gives European settlers the right to live on Indigenous land (39). 

But to understand the politics of place, “we first need to extend our understanding of place beyond social relations and implications to consider more deeply the land itself as well as nonhuman species that inhabit it,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “In other words, place has meanings and implications that extend beyond human considerations” (40). They reject the use of borders, border crossings, and transgressions as metaphors, because those things are literal and real (41). In discussions of borders, the land is ignored, “even when social identity comprises landed constructs, specifically the experiential knowledge of life shaped by borders” (41). They refer to Kevin Bruyneel’s 2007 book The Third Space of Sovereignty and its “boundary-focused approach” with approval (41). They also suggest that new materialism or object-oriented ontology work “breaks down the distinction between the social and material, turning and in some ways returning to understandings of materiality as encompassing of, rather than singling out, social relations” (42). In addition, they note the importance of sensory experience, which is central to critical place inquiry since “we understand experience of and in place as embodied and sensual: that it is not just who we ‘meet’ in place in terms of social and cultural influences,  but also that who we are and how we are is influenced by land and the nonhuman” (42).

Relationships of and to place, the co-authors continue, indicate “a deepened understanding of materiality” as a meshwork (Ingold) or an entanglement (Barad) of life on the planet (42). They note that in Indigenous cosmologies, the word land refers not just to the material aspects of places, but also to immaterial qualities—its spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects (42). Thus place brings together not only human histories, spatial relations, and social practices, but also “related histories and practices of land and other species” (43).

Practicing place or land in a way that engages “forms of critical Indigenous and environmental politics will mean different things to different people and communities,” Tuck and McKenzie write (43). The particularity of place can be a platform for resistance (43). Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Idle No More are offered as examples (44). Those movements involved the use of literal and virtual spaces and places (45). “Place itself, and our connections across place, can enable conceptualizations and practices of a ‘politics of place beyond place,’” they state, citing Doreen Massey’s 2009 interview (46), something I ought to read. “Critical place inquiry seeks to make the influences of place on organizing and resistance more discernable and, thus, better able to be mobilized,” the continue (46). 

But Tuck and McKenzie are not only interested in the politics of place; they are also interested in the ways that place is thought and enacted in research: “how we theorize place matters for how we do inquiry and research, but also what counts as evidence, as knowing, as legitimacy, as rigorous, as ethical, and as useful” (46). They hope that such research can be politically engaged, that it can help resist neoliberalism and settler colonialism (46). “Our hope is that the transformation of our very conceptual maps is informed by more deeply considered and more elaborately articulated theorizations of place and land,” they state as the chapter comes to a close (46-47). That is the reason the next chapter, on “decolonizing conceptualizations of place,” pays attention “to the latent assumptions of settler colonialism and encroachment of settler epistemologies on land and Indigenous life in social science research” (47). “Decolonizing conceptualizations of place, like the conceptualizations described in this chapter, yield implications for the ethics and protocols, topics, methodologies, and methods of research,” they conclude (47).

In that third chapter, they begin by outlining their purpose: “we zoom in our focus on decolonizing conceptualizations of place, which was discussed more generally alongside a variety of conceptualizations” in the previous chapter (48). “Our aim here is to attend to decolonial and Indigenous renderings of place, and the ways in which they depart from (and collide with) conceptualizations of place that derive from Western philosophical frames,” they state (48). Such renderings of place “are always spatially and temporally specific” (48). They are particularly interested in “decolonization away from settler colonialism, which projects those who already inhabited stolen land before settlers’ arrival as ‘spatially, socially, and temporally before . . . in the double sense of “before”—before it in a temporal sequence and before it as a fact to be faced,’” they write, quoting anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli (qtd. 49). Indigenous people, according to Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd, “must be central to theorizations of the conditions of globalization and postcoloniality”: the notion that place doesn’t matter “can be avoided if Indigeneity becomes a lens through which to view globalization and postcoloniality” (49).

These “decolonizing conceptualizations of place (and decolonization more broadly) draw upon Indigenous intellectualism and world views,” the co-authors continue, “which is why we discuss them together in this chapter” (49). Indigenous perspectives need to be at the centre of decolonizing theories and practices, although decolonial perspectives on place could also be informed by “Southern theories” and “theorizations of anti-Blackness in settler colonial nation-states” (49). “Decolonizing conceptualizations of place confront, undermine, disavow, and unsettle understandings of place that emerge from what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘Europe’s planetary consciousness,’” they state (qtd. 49). The “deep structure” of that consciousness, according to Quechua scholar Sandy Grande, involves five central beliefs: in progress as change and change as progress; in faith and reason as separate; in the impersonal, secular, material, mechanistic, and relativistic nature of the universe; in ontological individualism; and finally, “in human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of nature” (qtd. 50). “Grande posits that contemporary cultural and ecological crises can be credited to these deep structures,” Tuck and McKenzie state (50). Those deep structures “both afford and justify environmental degradation, cultural domination, and the practices of “overdeveloped, overconsumptive, and overempowered first-world nations and their environmentally destructive ontological, axiological, and epistemological systems” (Grande, qtd. 50). I always struggle with ideas that are rooted in faith or that deny the material and secular nature of the universe; my early religious training, and my reaction against that training, prevent me from being able to accept those ideas. I suppose that Sandy Grande would say that means I’m part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, but I can’t help that. There must be a way to learn from Indigenous perspectives without abandoning my hard-won refusal to believe in a Creator. If that’s not possible, then there’s nothing I can do about it, because my ideas about religious faith are not going to change.

Next, Tuck and McKenzie quote Vine Deloria, Jr., who argues, “Power and place produce personality. This equation simply means that the universe is alive, but it also contains within it the very important suggestion that the universe is personal and, therefore, must be approached in a personal manner” (qtd. 50). In other words, everything in the universe seeks and sustains “personal relationships,” which means that the key question to ask about proposed actions is whether the action is appropriate (50). “Appropriateness includes the moral dimension of respect for the part of nature that will be used or affected in our action,” Deloria, Jr. writes. “Thus, killing an animal or catching a fish involved paying respect to the species and the individual animal or fish that such action had disturbed. Harvesting plants also involved paying respect to the plants. These actions were necessary because of the recognition that the universe was built upon constructive and cooperative relationships that had to be maintained” (qtd. 50-51). Indigenous philosophies of place, then, “represent significant epistemological and ontological departures from those that have emerged in Western frames” (51). However, Indigenous relationships to land are not romantic; rather, they are familiar and only sacred because they are familiar (51). The universe is a web in which everything exists together (51). The co-authors cite Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman, who contends that the idea of Indigenous relationships to land are not “given, unchanging, and naturalized,” but that they are contained in stories (51). That summary of the quotation Tuck and McKenzie include here is inadequate, but it reminds me that I have a copy of Goeman’s book and that it is likely to be more helpful to me than I had anticipated.

Decolonization, Tuck and McKenzie continue, needs to “draw on conceptualizations by Indigenous peoples,” and it needs to be understood literally, not metaphorically (52-53). Here they are referring to Tuck’s article, with K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” They note that decolonization in settler colonial states “is complicated because there is no separation between empire, settlement, and colony/colonized,” and contend that when decolonization is used metaphorically, that complexity is lost (52-53). 

Conceptualization, though, is not the right word: it suggests that thinking is only done with the mind, as something separate from the body (53). Indigenous philosophies “engage questions of self, us, the (living) world, interactions with it, interactions with ideas,” and so they involve the body as well as the mind (53). Thus, words like conceptualization or theorization are not right, because of the narrowness of such words in Western definitions (53-54). Tuck and McKenzie contend that “the epistemological and cosmological departures represented by Indigenous worldviews (especially when compared to Western perspectives) require an expansion to the connotative meanings of concept/ualization” (54). Words like “relationships” are helpful in describing what they’re trying to say, “but only if they are imbued with notions of intention, consideration, reflection, and iteration,” along with “resistance, land, knowing, and experience over generations” (54). 

Nor are place and space the correct words; Indigenous writers use those words to refer to something different from what they mean in Western philosophical traditions (54). They quote Vine Deloria, Jr.: “Even though we can translate the realities of the Indian social world”—which includes “the world, and all its possible experiences”—“into concepts familiar to us from the Western scientific context, such as space, time, and energy, we must surrender most of the meaning in the world when we do so” (qtd. 54-55). Deloria, Jr. argues that the central concepts in the Indigenous worldview are place and power: living beings have their proper place in the world, and power suggests “spiritual power or life force” (qtd. 55). Thus Indigenous authors often use the word “land” instead of place, as a shorthand for land, water, air, and subterranean earth, but they use that word with the experiential sense Deloria, Jr. invokes (55). “Among Indigenous peoples, relationships to land and place are diverse, specific, and un-generalizable,” they state, since every Indigenous group had its own relationship to their land. For that reason, “land” is “imbued with these long relationships and . . . the practices and knowledges that have emerged from those relationships” (54).

The relationship between place and land is not unlike the relationship between individuality in Western thought and collectivity in Indigenous life and knowledge systems (55). According to Tuck and McKenzie, the ontology of place-based paradigms is something like “I am, therefore place is,” but in contrast, the ontology of land-based paradigms is more like “Land is, therefore we are” (55-56). In other words, the ontology of place privileges the individual human, whereas the ontology of land privileges land and the life of a collective (56). “This represents a profound distinction that cannot be overlooked,” they contend. “Understandings of collectivity and shared (though not necessarily synchronous) relations to land are core attributes of an ontology of land” (56). In addition, “the land-we ontology . . . is incommensurable with anthropocentric notions of place” (56). The land comes first. Ontologies that put humans first, that put humans at the centre of place, or as “small and simple cogs in a universal scheme,” are not compatible with Indigenous land-we ontologies (56). Indeed, many Indigenous cultures refer to land formations as ancestors (56-57). That notion is “simultaneously poetic and real; it is both a notion and an action” (57). 

These ideas about land, Tuck and McKenzie continue, aren’t just about its materiality, but also its spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects (57). Land is a teacher, a conduit of memory (57). Relationships to land are “familial, intimate, intergenerational, and instructive” (57). The idea that the land is a parent is not a metaphor; nor is the idea that the land is the first teacher (57). Land includes the urban; it’s not just about “green spaces” (58). Ideas about land are not “static or performable” (58). In addition, “mindfulness of non-Indigenous desires to access assumed Indigenous knowledge also needs to extend to a mindfulness of non-Indigenous desires to adopt or use such knowledge” (58). “This is difficult terrain in working both with Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples: to acknowledge and include Indigenous knowledge and perspectives by in non-determined ways that do not stereotype Indigenous knowledge or identities,” Tuck and McKenzie write (58). I’m not sure what that means for part of my research, which attempts to develop a relationship with the land through walking. 

Next, Tuck and McKenzie turn to theories of colonialism. They suggest that most theories of colonialism have not focused on settler colonialism, but that has changed in the past two decades (59). “Settler colonialism is a form of colonization in which outsiders come to land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and claim it as their own new home,” they write (59). Exploitation colonizers and settler colonizers want different things: “the exploitation colonizer says to the Indigenous person, ‘you, work for me,’ whereas the settler colonizer—because land is the primary pursuit—says to the Indigenous person, ‘you, go away’” (59, citing Lorenzo Veracini). Settler colonial states don’t recognize themselves as such, “requiring a continual disavowal of history, Indigenous peoples’ resistance to settlement, Indigenous peoples’ claims to stolen land, and how settler colonialism is indeed ongoing, not an event contained in the past” (60). Most settlers don’t think about the fact that they live on Indigenous land or consider themselves implicated in the continued settlement and occupation of Indigenous land (60). Settler colonial states are hierarchical, with settlers at the centre of all typologies, at the top of the hierarchy (60). Settler colonialism is “a form of biopower,” because in some contexts, it has relied on slavery (Indigenous or African diasporic subjugation) (61). Finally, settler colonialism tries (and fails) “to contain Indigenous agency and resistance. Indigenous peoples have refused settler encroachment, even while losing their lives and homelands” (61). “Thus, when we theorize settler colonialism, we must attend to it as both an ongoing and incomplete project, with internal contradictions, cracks, and fissures through which Indigenous land and knowledge have persisted and thrived despite settlement,” Tuck and McKenzie write (61).

The notion that Indigenous people traded land in treaty negotiations “because they lacked serious understanding of buying and owning land” is a false narrative, according to Tuck and McKenzie (62). “There is indeed a problem with Western conflations of place and property, but not because Indigenous peoples were/are too pre-modern to understand property,” they argue (63-64). In fact, history shows that Indigenous peoples “engaged in heated debates over notions of colonial property and extensively used legal arguments to oppose European dispossession from the very outset of colonial occupation” (64). 

“Through the process and structuring of settler colonialism, land is remade into property, and human relationships to land are redefined/reduced to the relationship of owner to his property,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “When land is recast as property, place becomes exchangeable, saleable, and steal-able” (64). However, the most important aim of this recasting “is to make it ahistorical to hack away the narratives that invoke prior claims and thus reaffirm the myth of terra nullius. Existing epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward” (64). The notion of land as property is central to the ideologies of settler colonialism, which are “reliant upon constructions of land as extractable capital, the structural denial of indigenous sovereignty, the fantasy of discovery, and the naturalization of heteropatriarchal nation-state” (65). (Why the nation-state is heteropatriarchal is not clear: it is flexible enough to allow women and LGBTQ2+ people to occupy places of power.) 

“Western notions of place have been compromised by an over-reliance on the European, colonial notion of property,” but Indigenous thinkers and Elders remind us that “there are more complex and meaningful relationships to land that humans have always enacted” (65). Those relationships continue, despite settler colonialism: “the interwoven aspects of land (origin) stories, claims, and identity” that comprise “Indigenous peoples’ relationships to place” have not disappeared (65). Those stories show how the people are possessed by the land and answerable to it (65). The “structure of settler colonialism” has “reduced human relationships to land to relationships to property, making property ownership the primary vehicle to civil rights in most settler colonial nation-states” (65). 

Settler colonialism erases the presence of Indigenous people, turning them into savages and, eventually, ghosts (66). However, “by their survivance and persistence,” Indigenous peoples “disprove the completeness, cohesiveness, civility, and ultimately the presumed permanence of the settler nation-state” (66). In addition, settler colonialism “structures anti-blackness by circulating stories of (the descend[a]nts of) chattel slaves as monsters, as requiring containment” (67). For instance, in the United States, “the contemporary prison industrial complex” is “an extension of chattel slavery, in which Black and brown bodies are contained to build the wealth of mostly white towns relying financially on incarceration centers” (67). I would think the use of prison labour or the existence of private prisons are much stronger arguments on this point than keeping white towns alive by keeping prisons open or expanding them. 

Settlers are defined by their actions—by their “attempts to live on stolen land and make it their home. A desire to emplace is a desire to resolve the experience of dis-location implicit in living on stolen land” (67). Settlers are not immigrants, because they do not attempt to fit into the already existing communities and cultures; instead, “they implement their own laws and understandings of the world onto stolen land” (67). “Settler emplacement is incommensurable with Indigenous life insofar as it requires erasure of Indigenous life and ontologies,” which leads settlers to “engage a range of settler moves to innocence to relieve themselves of the discomfort of dis-location, and to further emplacement/replacement” (67). Tuck and Yang’s essay is cited again here. No doubt Tuck would consider my walking project a settler move to innocence. 

Tuck and McKenzie note that there are “variations to the settler colonial triad”—the three structures of Indigenous erasure, Black containment, and Settler ascendancy they have been discussing—including Jodi Byrd’s use of the word “arrivants” to describe people forced to come to the Americas through the violence of global colonialism and imperialism (67). “This nomenclature is a recognition of the ways in which arrivants both resist and participate as settlers in the historical project of settler colonialism,” since both settlers and arrivants take Indigenous land as their own (67).

Settler colonialism wants Indigenous land (67). It turns that land into property “by destroying Indigenous peoples, and turns humans into chattel/property by destroying their humanity” (68). Indigenous peoples must be erased or turned into ghosts. At the same time, “settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labour of chattel slaves whose bodies and lives become property” (68). This somewhat repetitive argument doesn’t apply to all settler colonial states, however, because not every settler colonial state based its economy on slavery the way that the United States did.

“One of the ways in which current theories of space and place that emerge from Western philosophical frames are incommensurable to Indigenous and decolonizing conceptualizations involves the degree to which Western theories enable or are agnostic towards settler emplacement,” Tuck and McKenzie write. The core strategy of settler emplacement, “the desire of settlers to resolve the experience of dis-location implicit in living on stolen land,” involves “the discursive and literal replacement of the Native by the settler” (69). I fear that the co-authors would consider my walking project an example of settler emplacement. Settler emplacement can never lead to decolonization (69). The idea of replacing Indigenous peoples as the rightful claimants of the land is invested in settler futurity (69). 

Here, they define that term: “futurity is more than the future, it is how human narratives and perceptions of the past, future, and present inform current practices and framings ina. way that (over)determines what registers as the (possible) future. Settler futurity, then, refers to what Andrew Baldwin calls the ‘permanent virtuality’ of the settler on stolen land” (69-70). Both replacement and emplacement “are entirely concerned with settler futurity, which always indivisibly means the disruption of Indigenous life to aid settlement” (70). “Any form of place or space theory that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state, is invested in settler futurity,” Tuck and McKenzie contend. “In contrast, Indigenous futurity forecloses settler colonialism and settler epistemologies. This does not mean that Indigenous futurity forecloses living on Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples. That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples” (70). 

I wish that Tuck and McKenzie would have said more about the differences between Indigenous futurity and settler futurity. They refer to an essay by Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, which I’ve blogged about here. I found that essay very difficult to unpack. (As an aside, I hate the way APA citation format encourages offhand citations to texts without requiring writers to engage seriously with the texts cited or explain what aspects of those texts are actually important.) I find the discussion of the term “futurity,” and the reference to Baldwin’s essay, which I’ve also blogged about here, frustratingly vague. The “permanent virtuality” quotation, for instance, has nothing to do with settlers living on stolen land; rather, it refers to the way that the future “can be known and hence real, as [Ben] Anderson suggests, but because it can never be fully actualized as the future, the future remains a permanent virtuality” (173). The reference to Ben Anderson is to yet another essay on futurity that I’ve blogged about here, where he talks about futurity as anticipatory action (777). You see, I’ve worked at understanding this concept, and yet it still remains opaque to me. Maybe I’m just stupid.

Finally, Tuck and McKenzie note that “Indigenous peoples have predicted the collapse of settler societies since contact, all the while building and articulating viable alternative epistemologies and ontologies” (70). They see the interest in decolonization as a sign that settlers now recognize “impending environmental and economic collapse,” and quote Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on this point (70-71). Decolonization, however, “is not just something that humans (may) do; it is (primarily) something that the land does on its own behalf. Whether or not humans can survive this latter form of decolonization can’t be known” (71).

The book’s second part leaves theory behind and moves to methodologies and methods of critical place inquiry. I’m honestly not sure how useful this part of the book is likely to be for me, since I’m not a social scientist and don’t want to become one, but I will persevere. They define methodology as “the epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions guiding the research, or in other words, the ways in which the researcher’s explicit or implicit assumptions are at work in the selection of research focus, problem, and approach” (76). Methodology, in this definition, is the researcher’s paradigm or worldview (76). That’s not what I learned in the course I took on methodologies in the fine arts—in fact, it almost returns the book to a discussion of theoretical perspectives on critical place research, I think—but perhaps that doesn’t matter, or the course I took was based on an incorrect definition of methodology. They also describe the term as the assumptions about knowledge, reality, the role of research in society that are embedded in research, distinguishing it from methods, which are specific ways of collecting data and analyzing it (79). The methodology “drives and informs how those methods are used, and with and by whom,” they write (79). They distinguish between empirical research, which “involves the collection and analysis of quantitative or qualitative data,” and conceptual research, which prioritizes “the use and development of ideas in addition to and beyond what can be collected through empirical research” (79). “Thus, while all approaches can be considered to be conceptual and empirical on one level,” in this chapter the co-authors focus on “methodologies that involve some quantitative or qualitative data collection and analysis” (79).

Tuck and McKenzie begin with archival research and its connection to place. Representations of place in an archive might include photos of places, maps, and historical accounts of places (81). They note that there are very different ways of thinking about archival research as a method (80-81). 

Next, they discuss narrative inquiry and place. “Narrative and storytelling methodologies hold that narratives are how humans come to know, understand, and make meaning in the social world, while also making ourselves known, understood, and meaningful in the world,” they write (82). Narrative inquiry about place would involve stories about places (83). However, the co-authors also mention an artistic walking project by Misha Myers that brought together storytelling and walking in a methodology Myers called “conversive wayfinding” (qtd. 83). I’ve read about that project, and I might have read the essay Tuck and McKenzie refer to here, but I haven’t blogged about it, so I don’t recall. I seem to have outsourced my memory to this blog. 

After narrative inquiry and place research comes phenomenology and place research. Phenomenology, they state, “can be understood as attempting the objective study of topics that are usually regarded as subjective, such as perceptions and emotions” (84). Phenomenology tries to get at the lived experience of places and the attachment of people to places (84-85). They cite many examples of such research, particularly David Seamon’s work (85). 

Following that discussion is ethnography and place. Tuck and McKenzie note that ethnography means the study of culture, and that it has been critiqued because of the lenses that researchers bring to ethnography and the appropriateness of conducting research across cultures (86). They note that ethnography has more recently been used by researchers to study their own culture (86). Ethnography has always been concerned with place, “with the physical settings of the ordinary and their relationships to other material aspects of people’s lives, such as household objects, animals, institutions and technologies” (86). There are many different kinds of ethnography, including autoethnography and sensory or visual ethnography (86-87). Its strength as a methodology is “its fine-grained descriptive focus,” in the way it shows how people relate to place by showing instead of telling, “bringing alive for the reader socially embedded qualities of particular places in relation to their historical, spatial, and political contexts” (87). Among the ethnographic works they discuss is Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst’s edited collection about walking and ethnography, which I’ve blogged about here. That collection of essays, they write, “suggests the ways that knowledge is forged, both by the researched and the researcher, through the performances and habits of walking, as well as its embodied memories” (87).

Next is a discussion of participatory action research (PAR) and place, and community-based research and place. There is some disagreement about whether participatory action research is a methodology (88). It is, Tuck and McKenzie write, “an ethical framework in which exploitation is consciously theorized and avoided, people and their ideas are valued, and collaboration and mutual benefit are highly prized. Participatory action researchers engage in this approach because of its ethical touchstones, but also because they see it as resulting in richly textured, accurate, and useful data” (88). The word “action” suggests the way that this kind of research sets out to change things, not just document them (88). These forms of research, “because they are participatory and involve the efforts of real people in real places, are methodologies that can yield real and useful knowledge about place and places,” although that is not always highlighted (89). However, even after reading this discussion, I’m not completely certain what PAR is or how it operates. I also find myself wondering if there’s any crossover between PAR and social or relational aesthetics. Probably not, given the differences between art practices and social-science research.

Following that section is a discussion on mixed, post, and strategic methodologies. These approaches to research are often considered postmodern or new materialist in their theoretical orientation. One example is a project about drought in Australia “undertaken by a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers” that has been described in multiple and contradictory ways, including as arts-based research (92). 

“With this book’s emphasis on critical place inquiry, whether research captures reality in some ways and/or is a performance or product of the world is overshadowed by what it is that the research itself does,” Tuck and McKenzie tell us. “In this vein, there have been critiques of the emphasis on novelty and invention in the previously described approaches at the expense of a focus on the research’s impact on social and broader material conditions” (93). What do these methodologies do in the world? They suggest that “framings and methods of research are designed to maximize the potential to act as a form of intervention, or as public scholarship,” an orientation that “could perhaps be considered a strategic methodological approach, which involves selecting the methodology and methods of research best suited to the type of data and analysis most likely to critically inform the decision-making and conditions surrounding a particular issue” (93). This, they continue, “is one of the methodological approaches with which we align, and it informs our motivations for writing a book discussing the range of theories, methodologies, and methods of research that can be mobilized in critical research in and on place” (93).

After that, Tuck and McKenzie turn to Indigenous methodologies and land. They suggest that these methodologies involve “deep connections between Indigenous knowledge and land” (94). There are several epistemic touchstones in books about Indigenous methodologies, and they are all based on “rootedness on and in relationship to land” (94). “Indigenous methodologies both are enacted by and seek to study relationships, rather than object-based studies that typify Western sciences,” they write, particularly relationships to land and place (94). Indigenous knowledges exist “within a universe that is relational and responsive” (95). Thus, reciprocity is another touchstone of Indigenous methodologies—even its ethical starting place (95). Reciprocity is the antithesis of extraction (95). In Indigenous methodologies, reciprocity has cosmological connotation, concerned with maintaining balance not just between humans, but with energies that connect and thread through all entities in the universe,” a statement “that is grounded in Indigenous metaphysics,” which “is regarded within Indigenous worldviews as simultaneously sacred and mundane,” rather than mystical (95). The “long view” is the third epistemic touchstone of Indigenous methodologies (95). “By the long view, we mean the centuries-long, or millennia-long sense of time that allows a vision of land and place as animated, formed and unformed, mountains growing at the same speed of fingernails, and oceans and ice flows shaping the coasts,” they write. “It is the long view that shows what is so alarming about rapid human-induced climate change, and it is the long view that might guide decisions related to energy and fuel sources, human migration, the whole of social life, and the necrophilic logics of late capitalism and neoliberalism” (95). Decolonization is the last epistemic touchstone (95). Although there are differences between decolonization and Indigenous thinking, Indigenous methodologies are linked to decolonization because they represent “a viable alternative ontological frame that has persisted and resisted neoliberalism and market logics” (96).

The next chapter, on methods of critical place inquiry, begins with an account of a dérive in Saskatoon, of all places, undertaken by McKenzie and her colleagues. I have to read that article! But the article referred to in the text isn’t really a discussion of that walking event. The brief description in the book is all I’m going to get. Nevertheless, they suggest that “[t]his example of urban walking as teaching and research method suggests several of the key issues we will focus on in this chapter” (98). This chapter is about methods, the ways that data is collected and analyzed, and it will discuss how that happens in relation to place, including “embodied aspects of data and data collection and analysis processes” (98). 

First, Tuck and McKenzie discuss types of data collected or created in research: both “concrete” and “abstract” aspects of place. “Concrete aspects of places are defined as including the physical characteristics and objects present in a place, as well as how humans interact with these places and objects through their senses,” they write. “The category of abstract aspects of a place is used to refer to inner processes that places evoke, including dreams, imagination, memory, and feelings as they relate to people’s understandings and connections to place” (99). Visual methods can include seeing places with participants (walking, for instance), “or are created with or by participants (photos or video),” which “enable more insight into the concrete aspects of place that may be affecting understanding and actions” (99). “Oral data collection methods, including interviews,” can “provide data on abstract orientations to place through information on participants’ thoughts, memories, and feelings as they relate to place” (99). Of course, photographs or videos have formal characteristics that may suggest abstract aspects of places as well, so these typologies are not as clear-cut as Tuck and McKenzie seem to suggest. Nevertheless, they consider this typology useful for “understanding the value of different types of methods for eliciting qualitative data on place and people’s relationships to place” (99). It also suggests “the value of going beyond oral or written methods to include visual and sensory modes of data collection,” they state, citing Sarah Pink’s work on sensory and visual ethnography, which I have yet to read (99). 

However, they continue, “a typology of concrete and abstract aspects of place also assumes these considerations can be separated—that objects and physical characteristics are merely physical without human abstraction; and likewise that human thoughts and feelings do not have concrete or material qualities such as manifestations in the body” (100). They note that “a number of different approaches emphasize the liveliness or agency of the land and materiality, and/or the embodied and emplaced aspects of human thoughts, memories, or feelings” (100). When researchers move past seeing place as a static background, “and instead consider more fully how place and materiality more broadly are mutually constitutive with the social, it changes the research frame”: researchers “become interested not only in how humans perceive or understand places, but also how various aspects of places themselves are manifested as well as influenced through human practices” (100). 

To conduct research with the kind of active and contextual orientation provided by theories that understand place “as mobile, as mutually constitutive with the social through practice, as manifesting and perpetuating power relations including those of colonization, as emphasizing land and the non-human in addition to social considerations of place, and as perpetuating and enabling of politics” suggests “the need to go beyond collecting data from and with human research participants on and in place” and to also examine “place itself in its social and material manifestations” (100-01). They state that in this chapter they will “discuss four interwoven areas for consideration in selecting or developing methods for critical place research,” including land and materiality, embodied and emplaced data, memory and historical data, location and mobility, and accountability to community” (101). Yes, I count five areas for consideration, too. I’m not sure why Tuck and McKenzie say there are four.

First up is land and materiality in data. The co-authors quote Daniel Wildcat’s contention that being in a forest or other natural space is a source of experiential knowledge (101) and Margaret Kovach’s suggestion that Indigenous research approaches are specific to place and local knowledge, that they come from long histories of interrelationships with particular territories (101). That situatedness separates Indigenous peoples from settler societies, according to Kovach. She draws on traditional nêhiyaw knowledge for an analogy between Indigenous research and the buffalo hunt: the researcher must be prepared, the research must be prepared, there are cultural and ethical protocols to be followed, the process is guided by respect, and the resulting knowledge must be shared in a process of reciprocity (101-02). For Kovach, the buffalo hunt “provides an epistemological teaching, a reference point for how to do things in a good way born of place and context specific to Plains tribes” (qtd. 102). For Tuck and McKenzie, this analogy “suggests the place-specific aspects of methods, including the importance of place-specific protocols, relationships, and accountabilities in designing and conducting empirical research by and with Indigenous peoples” (102). 

Kovach also discusses the importance of “how specific knowledge of and with place is held in storied practice” (102). “The weaving of place and story yields knowledge not only about social life, but of the embedded understandings of other beings and the land,” Tuck and McKenzie write (102). Narrative is central to Indigenous research methods, but it’s not the only method available: “For Indigenous scholars undertaking research on and with place, data may be gathered through a wide range of methods, including protocols, narratives and storytelling, dreams, sharing circles, walking, mapping, or other methods” (102). Research methods are forms of ceremony, they suggest, citing Shawn Wilson’s book, “within an Indigenous paradigm of relationality, and as undertaken by Indigenous people” (102). They also cite Mishuana Goeman’s argument that mapping is an important Indigenous research practise (102), although I’m not sure that would be available to settlers. I’m not sure how many of these Indigenous research methods are available to settlers without being accused of, or actually engaging in, cultural appropriation. 

Sociomaterial approaches to research may “share an understanding of the performativity of materiality, including of human beings and social relations” (103). I don’t know what “performativity of materiality” means, though they refer to Jane Bennett’s work, which I’ve been planning to read, on the relations and connections between things in the world (103). A variety of contemporary theoretical approaches to research, including actor-network theory and spatiality theories, share approaches to sociomaterial research approaches (103). Those approaches “take whole systems into account, regardless of the scope of the material or activity that has been chosen as the research focus”; they “trace interactions among human and non-human parts of the systems, emphasizing heterogeneity of system elements” and the need to focus on relationships between those elements; they “understand human knowledge to be embedded in material action and interaction,” without privileging “human intention or consciousness” but rather focusing on how subjects and objects of knowledge “emerge together through activity” (103). “These epistemological and ontological, and thus methodological, orientations in turn affect the research methods engaged,” Tuck and McKenzie suggest (103). For instance, sociomaterial interactions are mapped by researchers (103). The liveliness of objects is considered (103). The connections between objects and places are explored (104). Object agency or “thing power” is considered (104). Embodiment and sensation are important as well (104). In addition, research becomes more experimental and eventful, even playful (104).

“Other trajectories of research focus in particular on the relationships between human bodies and places in developing and approaching research methods,” Tuck and McKenzie continue (105). Embodiment, in this context, refers to the interrelationships between body, mind, and environment (105). According to the co-authors, “it is now commonly recognized that we need to investigate the emplacement of research participants, and it is equally important for researchers to acknowledge their own emplacement as part of research contexts” (105). Phenomenology “is one methodological frame that entails methods of seeking to elaborate and understand embodied relationships to place,” they note (105). However, because of concerns about representing experience in language, “increasingly researchers have turned to additional methods to examine, represent, or mobilize embodied understandings of and in place,” from “ethnographic observations of participant interactions with place,” to “historical photo analysis,” “mental mapping,” or “participatory video” (106). “Visual methods have especially become more common, particularly photography, video, mapping and drawing, but also visual arts more broadly as well as web-based representation,” they state, citing Sarah Pink’s work on visual ethnography to contend that “visual methods must be developed and determined as appropriate to diverse research sites” (106). 

Mental mapping, also known as cognitive mapping, is one important method of researching embodied relationships to place (106). Such maps are persona, subjective, and intimate (106). They present examples of cognitive mapping (106-08), but despite those examples, I’m not sure what it involves or how it is different from other forms of mapping—especially when they suggest that cognitive mapping can be linked to GPS coordinates as a way of linking drawings or interview responses “to actual locations on a map, collating and displaying the data in meaningful ways” (107). 

“However, engaging diverse methods focused on embodied and emplaced understandings and practices also extends beyond the visual, and oral representations of the visual,” Tuck and McKenzie state (100). Sensory ethnography, in Sarah Pink’s words, tries “to access areas of embodied, emplaced knowing and to use these as a basis from which to understand human perception, experience, action and meaning and to situate this culturally and biographically” (qtd. 108). They cite Tim Ingold’s suggestion that the senses are not separate but rather different facets of the same activity to suggest that “attending to these varied facets can provide richer data” (108). They note Ingold’s influence on Pink’s work (and I’m a big fan of Ingold’s work) (108). They suggest that “the ways in which the senses play a role in how cultures and places are constituted and changed” is important, and that the link between the senses and memory needs to be considered if we think of memories as “sedimented in the body” (108-09). “These considerations extend to how cultural, gendered, racialized, class-based, generational, and other experiences and identities influence the meanings and memories imbued into sensory encounters,” they state (109).

However along with “a reflexivity about how the sensory experiences of the researcher and participants are produced through and influence the research encounter, considering emplaced understandings in research entails selecting methods that are aligned with the research questions and setting of focus” (109). So, for instance, “[t]he location of observation, as well as other research methods such as interviews, can also influence the ability to attend to embodied and emplaced data—for example, in eating or walking with participants or interviewing or working together in different locations” (109). The point seems to be using “multi-sensory data” to demonstrate “various forms of emplaced knowledge” (110). 

Next, Tuck and McKenzie discuss memory and historical data. “This section interfaces with earlier sections on land and material data, and embodied and emplaced data, and focuses in on the temporal dimensions of research methods concerned with place and social life,” they write. “Specifically, it highlights the use of historical data in studying past, present, and future conditions, including the ways in which research methods address memory as social science research on and in place” (110). They suggest, quoting oral historian Lynn Abrams, that memory is “a process of remembering: the calling up of images, stories, experiences and emotions from our past life, ordering them, placing them within a narrative or story and then telling them in a way that is shaped at least in part by our social and cultural context” (qtd. 110). Memory is not an abstract concept, but rather “a practical and active process of reconstruction whereby traces of the past are placed in conjunction with one another to tell a story” (Abrams, qtd. 110). Memory is about the individual, but it is also about the community, the collective, and the nation (110). In this way, individual memories “are situated within a field of memory work that operates at many levels in society” (110). 

Place has “a significant influence in the shaping and recalling of memory,” they continue (111). “Places can function intentionally or implicitly as ‘sites of memory,’” such as public memorials, historic sites, or tourist destinations (111). Memories are “actively constructed and reconstructed in relationship to land and place,” Tuck and McKenzie continue (111). For this reason, researchers “need to ask why specific stories are told in particular ways and in particular locations, and how individual and collective memories are constituted and shifted through various manifestations of memories, whether in place sites, individual stories, or collective narratives” (111). Stories related to individual and collective memories are central to many research methods, and Tuck and McKenzie suggest that these include memory-work, oral/life history, qualitative longitudinal research, ethnography, intergenerational, and follow-up studies, along with “a broad range of narrative and storytelling approaches, including Indigenous methodologies” (111). “However, memory is a central aspect of social life and thus can also be considered implicit in all methodologies and methods,” they contend (111). In addition, social-science researchers “have taken up a focus on the role of the temporal in relation to place and social life, by engaging in multiple interviews and in different locations, in relation to historical documentary sources, in genealogies of specific practices, through participatory methods, and by many other means, in order to attempt to consider memory and the temporal in relation to place in research” (111). In addition, texts and maps can be used in historical research (112). Discussions of memory can also include an attention to nostalgia (113). Participatory action research can also be used to examine individual and collective memories (113). And, Tuck and McKenzie suggest, “sometimes the best way to consider the role of time in social and place-based practice is over time,” through longitudinal studies (114).

The chapter’s next section takes on location and mobility (114). Location, Tuck and McKenzie write, “matters in considering and operationalizing research methods” (114). In this section, they consider “how objects in different locations and the land itself can be considered actors in the research process,” and “how the location of the implementation of methods may matter for the data collected or created, including via mobile methods such as walking interviews or video go alongs, as well as how particular methods and technologies, such as social network analysis (SNA) and global positioning systems (GPS) are being use to map and analyze data in relation to location and mobility” (114). 

“Certain methodologies of research, such as ethnographic and participatory or community-based approaches, originated with a focus on attention to the location of data collection,” Tuck and McKenzie continue (114). However, the way that place influences the production of knowledge, or that “place could be harnessed to elicit information on identities, emotions, and power relationships,” is often overlooked (114). Where an interview takes place, in other words, is important and influences the information shared by participants (115). Considerations about the locations of the research also extend to mobile methods (115). Social network analysis identifies relationships between members of social or activist networks “in order to compare, understand, and potentially enhance those relationships” (115). 

The chapter’s last section discusses accountability with community in critical place research (116). Central to research on questions of Indigenous, social, or environmental justice “is how the research contributes to interventions in such conditions”; in other words, critical place research is supposed to be useful, rather than neutral (117). “The methodology and methods mobilized to such aims will depend on the social location and skills of the researcher, the audience and intended outcomes of the proposed research, what is feasible logistically and within given timeframes, and other considerations,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “However, deciding what approach to research is in the best interests of a given issue or context necessitates the input or participation of those potentially affected by the research or the issues it seeks to address” (117). 

The co-authors recognize “the obstacles associated with conceptualizations and practices of community accountability” (117). The word “community” has been critiqued, and yet it is necessary, because groups of people do have common experiences and solidarities (117). They turn to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s suggestion that “an Indigenous research agenda” has “Self-determination at its center,” and that self-determination is both a political and a social-justice goal (117). For Smith, rather than framing research ethics in a Western way, as individual informed consent, “there needs to be recognition and respect for community and Indigenous rights and views” (117-18). Aren’t both important, though? What is the relationship between individuals and communities? Do individuals never not fit into their community, for instance? Other researchers emphasize the researcher’s responsibility for following local protocols, “using methods epistemologically appropriate to the communities involved in the research,” and making sure that “the research gives back in concrete ways furthering the priorities of Indigenous peoples involved in the research” (118). How might art projects do that? It’s not clear to me, and a book on social-science theories, methodologies and methods isn’t going to answer that question.

“Related principles of ethics and accountability are also relevant to other communities, where past research experiences have served to marginalize or pathologize, and where research ethics are laced with assumptions about the naïvete and vulnerability of the researched,” Tuck and McKenzie continue (118). I’m not sure what the complaint about vulnerability might mean; surely some people or communities are vulnerable to marginalization or pathologization, for instance. The stories that are told or not told in research can do harm, rather than good, and researchers are responsible for those harms (118). For these reasons, “many researchers and communities have turned to participatory forms of research” that “entail research ‘with’ and ‘by’ the community” (118). I still don’t understand what participatory action research might look like, unfortunately, but I wonder what the role of the researcher’s expertise might be if communities are able to engage in research themselves. Why would a researcher with a PhD or years of experience be necessary at all in that case? A decolonial participatory research ethics will involve “considerations of reflexivity, expertise, humility, dignity, action, and relationality” (118). That kind of ethical approach “suggests highlighting researcher ‘blind-spots and biases’ in as much detail as ‘the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies of the people with whom we conduct research,’” they continue, citing Tuck and Monique Guishard (qtd. 118). This approach to research engages explicitly with settler colonialism in its consideration of research methods and ethics, and it “indicates how ‘participation’ needs to go beyond merely including more people in the data collection and/or analysis process” (118). The co-authors end this section of the chapter with a list of various research projects, including PAR projects, that conform to the ethical standards they have described (118-23).

The chapter’s last section discusses data analysis, which can take place during data collection or afterwards (123). “The specifics of what analysis can look like in relation to a particular data collection method ought to be determined in alignment with a study’s methodological underpinnings,” they note (123). However, what they’re interested in here are understandings of data analysis in relation to critical place research (123). “Specifically, we want to focus on the ways in which analysis functions to represent and produce research,” they write (123). The need to use language in data analysis means “that it is not possible to access experiences of place in unmediated ways” (123). Researchers therefore need to be reflexive, as do research participants, and diverse methods need to be used that enable everyone involved to see “from multiple angles in ways that might refract different understandings” (123-24). The divisions between art and social science need to be broken down—for social scientists more than for artists, I would think—in order to “shed light on these mediating influences” (124). Other social-science researchers suggest that traditional methodological models need to be avoided and that researchers should “focus on the material-discursive elements of events,” including considering the interaction between language and experience” (124). However, Tuck and McKenzie state that they worry that “a narrowed focus on the inventiveness of methods understood as performative misses the point of what types of interactivity are performed/represented and to what ends” (124). I wish I understood what they mean by “performative” and “performed” here—those words have many different connotations. In any case, they seem to agree with those who contend that research is messy and fragile, that it is entangled with the phenomena it studies, and that it is shaped by those phenomena in surprising ways (124). They quote John Law’s call for researchers “to think about method more inclusively by considering all modes of relating to the world as potentially suitable methods,” whether those methods are “verbal, pictorial, gestural, or affective” (qtd. 124-25). To that call, Tuck and McKenzie add that research “requires an ethical responsibility to consider the impact of the means and ends of the methods engaged” (125).

The next chapter examines Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry. “Our goal is not to set up a false binary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “Yet, while not at all mutually exclusive, there are specific features of Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry that set them apart from methods that emerge from other intellectual traditions” (126). They note that the term “Indigenous” denotes both a racialized group and “a collectivized political identity,” and that questions of who may be called Indigenous are “powerfully complex” (126-27). However, they write, “We adhere to definitions of Indigeneity that recognize the power of long-held relationships to land, the role of other tribal members in conferring belonging, and tribe-specific understandings of kinship and responsibilities related to kinship” (127). Their focus in this chapter is on “methods that have been developed by Indigenous scholars or in collaboration with Indigenous people to reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and articulating knowledge” (127). “Indigenous methods are Indigenous because they take inspiration from practices in tribal communities, because they are designed to be meaningful for Indigenous participants, and because they work to gather information that is useful to tribal communities” (127). In addition, “there are theoretical commitments that differentiate Indigenous research methods from non-Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry” (127).

Non-Indigenous research paradigms and tools “exhibit underlying beliefs of dominant settler colonial society” (128), and for that reason, Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes Indigenous and decolonizing research methods as “researching back” (qtd. 129). Researching back, Tuck and McKenzie write, engages “everyday people in rejecting and reclaiming theories that have been used to disempower them” (129). “Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry are designed to engage the survivance of Indigenous peoples,” they continue, noting that the term “survivance” refers “to ontologies directly connected to the ways that Indigenous peoples have always been” (129). That term, which comes from the work of Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, “is distinct from survival,” because it is about creating “spaces of synthesis and renewal” (qtd. 129). “Survivance,” Vizenor writes, “is an intergenerational connection to an individual and collective sense of presence and resistance in personal experience and the word, or language, and particularly through stories. Intergenerational communication looks different in other communities . . . but in Native communities on this continent the knowledge of survivance is shared through stories” (qtd. 129-30). There’s no way to know the outcome of survivance’s “spirited resistance”; it is “a force of nature, a new totem, and it has to be expressed and imagined to create a sense of presence” (130). “Because of the history of troubled and exploitative research conducted in Indigenous communities,” Tuck and McKenzie write, “concepts of researching back and survivance are bloodlines in Indigenous research methodologies” (129-30). 

Anticolonial methods and methodologies “refute the centrality of the experience of colonialism as primary in the configuration of indigeneity” and “refuse to characterize Indigenous peoples as the only peoples contained by their colonial condition” (130). “Anticolonial methods call attention to the resistance that Indigenous peoples have always engaged in response to colonization and to the persistence of Indigenous life beyond the colonial reach,” the co-authors state. They suggest that this means that it’s inaccurate to describe “all Indigenous methods as decolonizing methods,” but that “Indigenous methods do work within an anticolonial frame that pushes back against discourses that depict Indigenous peoples as (only) colonial subjects” (130).

Tuck and McKenzie discuss six Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry in this chapter (130). They include “Indigenous storywork, mapping place-worlds and place-making, (re)mapping, eating the landscape, urban Indigenous land-based pedagogies and community-based design research, and shellmound work” (130). Indigenous storywork is the first method they explore. Storytelling and “storylistening,” which together seem to constitute Indigenous storywork, is a research method in which Indigenous research participants tell stories, and in which those stories are data (131). It comes out of the work of Jo-Ann Archibald, who “developed a storywork research protocol that began with meeting with elders to seek permission and guidance” (131). The Elders talked about what made for good storytellers and good storytelling, storytelling for children, and sacred storytelling (131). When those meetings were finished, Archibald wrote a draft of a chapter on storytelling “that detailed what she had heard in her meetings with elders” (131). “The verification process of this draft took more than one year, with lots of meetings and approval of quotations by all involved individuals,” Tuck and McKenzie tell us, noting that “[t]his painstaking process reflected what was needed in order to conduct ethical and responsible research in this particular community and place” (131). That kind of process would be impossible for graduate students to follow, though, given the tight deadlines and short duration of most graduate programs now, unless those students already had a connection to a particular community. This kind of storywork method connects to place through name-place stories. “In their endurance, stories reinforce connections with people and places and suggest appropriate actions and relations, including with land,” Tuck and McKenzie write (132). Along with storywork, “conversations, interviews, research/sharing circles, and other methods of narration enable the relation of stories in and of place” (132). 

Mapping place-worlds and place-making is the next method. Tuck and McKenzie draw on the work of Abenaki writer Lisa Brooks, who writes about the connection between writing, drawing, and mapping, using an Abenaki word, awikhigawôgan, as a method (132). They also refer to settler anthropologist Keith Basso’s suggestion that place-making “is a profoundly human activity” based in “a sense of curiosity about which most humans are also curious: What happened here? Who was involved? What was it like?” (132-33). “The building of place-worlds is collective, creative, and generative,” they state (133). Brooks uses Basso’s notions of place-worlds and place-making to suggest that where things happen matters just as much as what happened (133). Building place-worlds, place-making, is “a revisionary act, a re-memory act, in which multiple pasts co-mingle and compete for resonance toward multiple futures” (133). However, Tuck and McKenzie point out that “place and land are not abstractions,” that Brooks spent a lot of time walking the land and paddling the waterways that feature in her books, sometimes alone and other times with friends (133-34). Brooks argues that readers need to participate in the awikhigawôgan process. I should probably read Brooks’s The Common Pot, given its emphasis on walking.

(Re)mapping “is a Native feminist discursive method that cannot be detached from material land,” and its goal is “to unsettle imperial and colonial geographies by refuting how those geographies organize land, bodies, and social and political landscapes” (134). It comes from the work of Seneca researcher Mishuana Goeman (134). (Re)mapping is a refusal of the way colonial geographies map the land (134-35). “Goeman’s project is to gather together exemplars of how Indigenous women have defined Indigeneity, their communities, and themselves through challenges to colonial spatial order, especially through literary mappings,” Tuck and McKenzie state. It’s not about recovering pre-contact ideas of Indigeneity, but rather about acknowledging “the power of Native epistemologies in defining our moves toward spatial decolonization” (qtd. 135). Goeman draws on Doreen Massey’s contention that space is the product of interrelations, a sphere of possibility, and “a simultaneity of stories so far,” which “move the discussion away from essentialism” to a focus on the idea that Indigenous space “always was and is in process” (135-36). Goeman’s (re)mapping refuses definitions of space “as limited to constructions of property” (136). (Re)mapping is a conceptual method, but Tuck and McKenzie suggest that it has implications for (re)mapping material, lived space: “Indeed its goal is to enact material change in Indigenous space and the space claimed by the settler colonial nation-state” (136). It does that by generating maps that present multiple perspectives that are up for negotiation (136-37). I have Goeman’s book but I have yet to read it; perhaps I need to do that work sooner rather than later.

While eating the landscape is defined by its originator, Enrique Salmón, as a practice rather than a methodology, Tuck and McKenzie suggest that “it could be an approach taken up by other scholars and community researchers as a research method” (137). Eating the landscape requires knowing about plants; Salmón was introduced to plants as relatives (137). Thus as an Indigenous method, eating the landscape involves understanding one’s kinship relation to plants and to the land. Food is Salmón’s point of entry into the land and to stories about the land, stories which make “surprising connections between (human) individuals, histories that make themselves known in contemporary time, mistakes made by outsiders just learning to tend to the landscape, and stories that affirm the roles of planting and picking in the cosmos” (137). Eating the landscape is also “an act of social reaffirmation” that re-energizes “kinship and social relationships shared across the (dinner) table” (138). 

Next is a discussion of urban Indigenous land-based pedagogies and community-based design research. I don’t know what community-based design research might be, although I think I have a dim grasp on the idea of land-based pedagogies, but the beginning of this section, with Anishinaabe water walkers, surprises me. Participation in the water walks inspired a community research project in Chicago “that would bring together more than one hundred Indigenous community members to design and implement innovative science learning environments for Indigenous youth and community” (138-39). That project “intentionally put Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies at the center; at its heart was a (re)storying of Indigenous relationships to Chicago as always was and will be Indigenous Land” (139). Doing that meant making evident “the settler colonial (il)logic of Chicago as urban and thus ceded land. Part of the work was to refuse the assumption that urban land is inherently no longer Indigenous land” (139). The study—I thought it was a pedagogical project, but it also involved research?—“was organized as a community design based research project and took place over six years” (139). “Facilitators created an iterative process for community members to participate in a design process that would result in the creation of out-of-school place-based science learning environments for Chicago’s Indigenous youth and families,” Tuck and McKenzie write (139). The focus was on knowing Chicago as the lands of their ancestors and visiting old village sites, understanding it as a wetland where many medicinal and edible plants grew and still grow, and understanding the impacts of invasive species on these lands (139). The land became the teacher (139). 

Interestingly, words consistent with settler epistemologies but not Indigenous epistemologies were discarded. The idea of invasive species, for instance, “was not compatible with other notions of plants as relatives that were so important to discussions with children and families” (140). So plants like buckthorn, which displace indigenous plant species, were still considered relatives, if not the relatives of the Indigenous people who were learning and teaching (140). Instead, those plants were described as “plants that people lost their relationships with” (qtd. 140). That’s interesting and provocative, but it might not help protect wetlands and grasslands from the effects of those plant species. I know a little about this, because the tiny pocket prairie I’ve planted in our yard is in danger of being overwhelmed by European and Eurasian species of grass—especially Kentucky bluegrass, which isn’t native to Turtle Island—and by perennials like creeping bellflower. I spent an hour yesterday trying to remove creeping bellflower, an introduced weed which is everywhere in this city, from that little patch of native grass and flowers. If I didn’t do that work, then soon there would only be creeping bellflower in the yard. 

Finally, Tuck and McKenzie turn to shellmound work. Shellmounds aren’t just heaps of discarded shells: “they are in fact the burial grounds of their ancestors” (140-41). In Oakland, when shellmounds were discovered, bodies were recovered (141). One site contained thousands of ancestors (141). It was the proposed site of a new mall, and the developers refused to change their plans, hauling the bodies of ancestors of Ohlone people off to landfills (141). People “began organizing shellmound walks to educate themselves; other Ohlone, Bay Miwok, and Indigenous peoples; and allies about the shellmounds, their locations, and the ocntinued presence even beneath the asphalt, shopping centers, and condominiums,” the co-authors tell us (141-42). One such walk too three weeks and covered almost 300 miles; the walkers prayed and learned about shellmounds during the walk (142). “They were joined by people form all over the world who were moved to learned and commemorate the land and the ancestors,” Tuck and McKenzie state, noting that this walk has been repeated many times, “often making different tracings across the land to visit and acknowledge each site,” and that shorter walks are also organized as well (142). None of this sounds like research to me—it seems to be more like political activism—but Tuck and McKenzie contend that “shellmound work can and should be understood as research method,” within a form of research they call decolonial participatory action research, which is explicitly anticolonial and focused on dismantling settler colonialism (145). “DPAR is reflexive with regard to purposes, stance, theories of change, and potential risks of action and research,” they write. “It seeks to interrupt existing knowledge hierarchies, taking seriously the expertise that is derived of lived experience. It requires humility and vulnerability, contestation and creative production” (145). It also “makes space for collective work that is defined by self-determination,” in which people talk about what has been silenced and uncover that which has been concealed (145-46). I wonder what remappings of this city similar to the shellmound work they describe in Oakland and other cities on San Francisco Bay might tell us. 

“What makes these methods Indigenous methods?” Tuck and McKenzie ask. “Are they Indigenous methods only because they have been made by Indigenous peoples for Indigenous communities?” (146). Yes, but that answer is incomplete (146). “These methods are distinct from other non-Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry because of the theoretical work beneath them” (146): in other words, the three theories that shape them—the role of refusals, the non-abstraction of land, and service to Indigenous sovereignty—set them apart from non-Indigenous research methods (146). 

The idea of refusals comes from the work of Audra Simpson (146-47). Refusals are performed when interviewees mark the limits of what can be said or shared or made public or explicit (147). In Simpson’s work, she refers to those refusals, because they are important (147). “In short, researcher and researched refuse to fulfill the ethnographic want for a speaking subaltern,” Tuck and McKenzie state (147). Such refusals are more than just a “no”: they redirect attention “to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned” (147). There are other forms of refusal. Goeman “refuses the recovery narratives that dot the landscape of Indigenous research” in favour of focusing on Indigenous futurity (147). Indigenous forms of place-based education don’t seek to re-inhabit the land—they refuse that goal—and instead set out to restory it, to see Indigenous peoples as its original inhabitants (148). “Refusal is a powerful characteristic of Indigenous methods of inquiry, pushing back against the presumed goals of knowledge production, the reach of academe, and the ethical practices that protect institutions instead of individuals and communities,” Tuck and McKenzie contend. “Again, refusal is more than just a no; it is a generative stance situated in a critical understanding of settler colonialism and its regimes of representation” (148). In the context of art practices, David Garneau’s call for “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality” (Garneau 33) or Dylan Robinson’s suggestion that structures of presentation and engagement that would exist for Indigenous artists and audiences alone are necessary (Carter, Recollet, and Robinson 211-12) would also fall under the category of refusal.

The non-abstraction of land refers to “generating real and lived impacts for specific groups of Indigenous peoples on specific expanses of land” (148). “Land is not a conceptual floatation device—although it could be because it figures so prominently in Indigenous literatures,” Tuck and McKenzie state. “Instead, each of the methods sets purposes about repatriation, rearticulation, and reclamation of Indigenous land. This land is locatable, walkable, material” (148).

In addition, “Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry seek to recognize, maintain, and expand Indigenous sovereignty,” either “through practices of self-determination and decision making, establishing bases for land claims, reorganizing prior chronological tellings of land into more useful organizations that show deep and sustaining connections, or through the reimagining of land through the foods it provides” (148). In other words, “Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry take seriously the sovereignty of Indigenous tribes and communities and seek to be useful in word and action” (148-49).

“Taken together, the three theoretical commitments of Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry help to explain how and why incommensurabilities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches may persist,” Tuck and McKenzie write (149). That’s because those non-Indigenous approaches “are bound to be invested in settler futurities, which by design cannot make space for Indigenous futurities,” which is not true of Indigenous futurities, “which do not require the erasure of those who now participate in settler-colonial societal structures as settlers” (149). I wonder about that latter point, since Tuck and Yang call for the return of “all of the land, and not just symbolically” (7), which would seem to leave no space for those who are now settlers. Perhaps the idea is that settlers would be absorbed into Indigenous polities? It’s not clear. In any case, what does seem clear is that settlers or non-Indigenous people are extremely unlikely to be able to use or participate in Indigenous research methods of any kind. “The task of critical place inquiry is to organize itself around commitments to Indigenous sovereignty, refusal, and the non-abstraction of land—not as peripheral points or extra considerations, but as foundational to its praxis,” the co-authors tell us (149), and I’m pretty certain that those three commitments are not available to settlers in any way. 

In their final chapter, Tuck and McKenzie consider how those commitments might take shape (149). The chapter’s title, “Ethical Imperatives of Critical Place Inquiry,” suggests that those commitments are the ethical ground of critical place inquiry. “The foundational axiom of this book is that place is significant in social science research but is rarely treated as such” (150). They have described and explored a variety of ways that research in the social sciences can address place (150-51). “Yet, questions still linger about why the call for more attention place and space has, for the most part, gone unheeded in social science? Or, put another way, why is it so easy for most social scientists to ignore place in their inquiries?” they ask (151). One answer to those questions is in Descartes separation of the mind from the body (151-52). “The implications of this cleaving are countless: it separated human consciousness from the material world; it initiated a preponderance of binaries; it amplified man’s dominion over the earth and its animals; it made the Western tradition simultaneously anthropocentric and removed humans from their understandings of ecosystems,” they state (152). Too many areas of critical research maintain that division between mind and body (152). However, “Indigenous studies has always existed outside, perhaps in spite of, the fallout of these separations of mind from body, individual from community and place” (152). I’m not sure Descartes is responsible for that latter separation, which is asserted rather than argued here.

Capitalism separates humanity from nature, and Western ideas that are embedded in “the logics of Enlightenment rationalities of prioritizing mind over body, individual over community, humans over nature” help to explain “why place has not been more significantly taken up in social science research to date (152). In addition, postmodernism’s emphasis on the discursive aspects of social life have led to a turning away from “the ontological or material, emphasizing the social constructions and effects of places, if considering place and land at all” (152-53). Also, settler colonial societies are unable “to recognize land and water in any way” (153). Settler colonialism works through denial, including the denial of place and land (154). 

“Legitimacy is an integral concept/worry in all research, whether acknowledged or not,” Tuck and McKenzie write. “The words more often used to convey legitimacy in social science research—reliability, validity, consistency, test-retest, inter-method—have to do with inquiry being considered trustworthy” (155). Research also has to be generalizable; in other words, what is true in one place must also be true somewhere else (155). These ideas, particularly the idea of generalizability, “may work against meaningful engagement in place in social science inquiry” (155). They describe the idea of catalytic validity—“the degree to which the research process re-orients, focuses, and energizes participants toward knowing reality in order to transform it” (Lather, qtd. 155)—as a way of thinking about the meaningfulness of research (155). “Catalytic validity can be intersected by Michelle Fine’s concepts of theoretical generalizability and provocative generalizability,” they continue (155). “Theoretical generalizability contends with the ways in which theory meaningfully travels from rich context to rich context, even against all odds of easy transfer,” they state, while provocative generalizability is about the ability of research to get people to do something about oppression (156). Tuck and McKenzie also refer to the idea that research must conform to established standards so that findings can be replicated (156). They contrast this idea to another definition of legitimacy, the idea that research comes out of a filial relationship, out of respect and love (156). In this formulation, “legitimacy is conferred through the embracing of trajectories of knowing, of multiplicity, of specificity, of the intersectional, of movement” (156-57). “What is made possible in critical place inquiry when it is this second definition of legitimacy that provides guidance?” they ask (157).

Drawing on these ideas, Tuck and McKenzie suggest the the criterion for legitimacy is “relational validity,” which is based on “paradigmatic understandings of the relationality of life,” which is foundational in Indigenous epistemologies; which understands “that the prioritization of ‘economic validity’ is harmful for people and places”; and which “implies that research is not only about understanding or chronicling the relationality of life and the inadequacy of economic validity, but also that research necessarily influences these conditions in small or significant ways,” so that it “impels action and increased accountability to people and place” (157-60). “Research ethics that promote and safeguard relational validity shift focus away from the linear procedural considerations of risk, benefit, and signatures of informed consent that now characterize the discourse on ethics of social science toward ecological considerations of mutual benefit, honoring, recognition, and the long view,” they state (160). This perspective is very different from ideas of research ethics that are about protecting institutions from accusations of mistreatment (160).

“Centering relational validity in ethical practice is not an easy thing to do,” they continue. “The culture of academe is not ideal for the cultivation of an ethical practice based on relational validity; existing research protocol review processes, professional benchmarks like tenure and promotion, and funding timelines may indeed work against the cultivation of relational ethics” (160). In addition, different places may need different kinds of research protocols (161). Also, the notion of an ethic of incommensurability, as Tuck and Wang suggest, may mean that portions of different projects cannot be aligned or allied, only engaged in contingent collaborations (162). The idea of mutual implication, of paying attention to the hyphen between self-Other, suggests ways that research practices “can be transformed to resist acts of othering” (162-63). Understood in a broad way, relational or dialogical ethics applies to land as well (163). It thus takes accountability to land and interspecies justice into consideration (164). Relational validity also is accountable to the future, particularly future generations (164). That form of accountability is central to critical place research (165-66).

There is a lot in this book that is useful, including its bibliography, and even though I’m left with questions after completing it, those questions are helpful and valuable. Of course, I’m not a social scientist, so a lot of the arguments here don’t apply clearly to my practice of walking and writing. I don’t have to worry about the legitimacy of my research the way that social scientists do, for instance, even though the concept of relational validity ought to be central to my practice. The sections on theory and methodology are more relevant to my work than the chapters on method, especially Indigenous methods, which I doubt would ever be available to me. There’s a lot here, though, and I’m interested to learn how we’ll be called on to use this book in the course that’s about to begin. I may find myself returning to it, if only as a source for theoretical and methodological work relevant to walking and to place. There is a lot to take in here, and despite this note-taking, I think I might have missed many of the book’s nuances.

Works Cited

Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 34, no. 6, 2010, pp. 777-98.

Baldwin, Andrew. “Whiteness and Futurity: Towards a Research Agenda.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 36, no. 6, 2012, pp. 172-87.

Carter, Jill, Karyn Recollet, and Dylan Robinson. “Interventions Into the Maw of Old World Hunger: Frog Monsters, Kinstellatory Maps, and Radical Relationalities in a Project of Reworlding.” Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies, edited by Heather Davis-Fisch, New Essays in Canadian Theatre Volume 7, Playwrights Canada Press, 2017, pp. 205-31.

Garneau, David. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation.” West Coast Line, no. 74, 2012, pp. 28-38. https://journals.sfu.ca/line/index.php/wcl/issue/viewFile/27/23

Ingold, Tim, and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. 2008. Routledge, 2016.

Tuck, Eve, and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández. “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, vol. 29, no. 1, 2013, pp. 72-89.

Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, Routledge, 2015.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.