Leaning into
Linda Lapiņa and Charlotte Grum
Related terms: emplacement, listening, performativity, relational ontology, research ethics, undoing, unlearning.
A glossary invites us, first and foremost, to define the concept that we are writing about. A habitual way to conceive of a definition would be that it can be applicable across different contexts. Instead of offering such a definition to be moved around, we choose to lean into this glossary as an opportunity to explore a situated, emplaced way of moving with the world - and in knowledge creation-research.
Rather than aiming to create transferable knowledge that aims and claims to be separable from place and relation, we would like to bring our site-resonating, embodied approach to knowledge creation in environmental humanities into the glossary. We feel that this is exactly what might make ‘leaning into’ a valuable concept for environmental humanities - its insistence on un-separability and intra-dependence, proposing a deeply relational researcher posture. In a very embodied and tangible way, ‘leaning into’ moves with the questioning of binaries such as subject/object (of knowledge), body/mind, nature/culture. It also proposes a critique of mastery and agency as individualised and individualizable achievements.
Consequently, leaning into suggests a certain onto-ethical posture in the researcher-practitioner, relevant for tuning in, listening to, becoming bodily aware, moving with and being moved by as a way of becoming knowledgeable about the world, each other, and the other. Leaning into approaches to knowledge as an engagement and a worldly as well as worlding practice – acknowledging our intra-dependence and emplacement.
The remaining part of the entry aims to perform leaning into. We invite you to lean into this moment together, as readers, writers, feelers, movers, and thinkers.
Take a breath.
What are you, perhaps always-already, leaning into?
Breathe out fully.
Only by daring to let go can space be given for in-breath.
Think of leaning into another body: a birch tree; a meadow; the sound of waves on a beach.
Think of walking backwards, of how your backside meets the world.
Think of all the times we struggle to make it, you struggle to make it, to survive within the logics of extraction and production. What if we co-created spaces that invited leaning into?
Leaning into, refiguring relational matter and holding matter as relational.
Leaning into, acknowledging our differences, inequalities and frictions.
Skin, bark, wool.
Asphalt and gravel.
Fingers, feelers, leaves and hoofs.
We lean into our collaborations, across different forms of embodiment and temporality; distributions of what counts as alive and what does not; terms of employment and access to privileges and influence or lack of same - within the university and beyond.
We lean into response-ability and accountability to each other, to ourselves, to the ecologies that hold us.
We lean into the flight of the dragonfly and the rumination of the sheep. We lean into the unruliness of Japanese knotweed and the expansive foldings of the walnuts, travelling from an old garden in the South of Denmark to becoming a pedagogical device in our teachings.
As we lean into, we let go.
We lean into discomfort and doubt.
We lean into uneven assemblages.
We acknowledge that we lean into with and through our whiteness, an energy-saving device that smoothens our paths and softens the way our surroundings meet our skins.
We lean into the privileges of inhabiting, moving in, bodies recognised and treated as Human, worthy of life and survival, as other bodies and places are rendered waste-able, killable, disposable.
Sometimes, we do not lean into. Sometimes we resist.
Sometimes, we lean into it as a form of resistance.
We do not always know when, how and whether to lean into. We cultivate leaning into as a way of moving with the world.
Take a deep breath. Leaning into this reading-writing moment together.
What are you leaning into right now?
What are you moving with, and how?
Let us continue moving together.
(Here, a link to padlet could be inserted)
In small letters:
We invite you to upload words, images, scribbles and sounds of learning into – you can be anonymous or not, whichever you prefer.
References
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