Diseño y desarrollo del material de apoyo

In designating the parameters of the field, researchers either draw their own lines or make use of pre-existing designated boundaries – around places, things, people and phenomena – to capture the parameters of those entities in the study. Researchers may, for example, draw lines around places in the first instance (local government areas or township boundaries), and then around groups of people within places (single women, teenage mothers, refugees, Aboriginal people, the homeless or the middle-class) and from these classifications, and others like them, knowledge is gathered, reality is made and the world is understood.

What is overlooked in all of this is that the lines that are drawn around places, people and things are imagined, created, and in turn work to create particular ways of seeing and interacting with the world. As shown in Figures 12-14, the ways in which lines are configured around places represent a given system of belief, but go on to shape the dominant imaginary and the directive force of power. So, too, with lines drawn around groups of people – what is it that makes one Aboriginal? Is it to have black skin, to believe in Aboriginal spirituality, to know culture? Likewise, what is it to be woman? Is it to wear a dress, have a vagina or breasts, or to think, engage and act like a woman? What difference would it be if places beginning with the letter P were chosen to represent reality; or all people who wear blue underwear? I do not argue

29 _{Academics operating in a non-academic capacity are prominent here. Harriet Hawkins blog (2013)}

107 for the removal of boundaries or categories (altogether), nor disrespect

representational, structured, symbolic research; however, I do believe that there are more options and greater potential for how knowledge is created – infinitely more options – options that require a sense of openness to the possibility of knowledge being and becoming otherwise.

108 Figure 13. Map of Australia (Department of Immigration and Border Protection

2012)

109 As developed in Chapter 1, the nature of these lines drawn around places as the rational configuration of boundaries led me to follow a less representational set of boundaries in choosing a random line of road between two places in rural remote Tasmania as the field of my research.

The present research, ‘drawing the betweenness of place’, grew out of both the humanistic tradition30 and the ‘radical’ and ‘new’ cultural geography movements31, as well as being informed by more contemporary poststructuralist and postmodernist debates32. Engaging with the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Haraway (1991), Muecke (1992), McDowell (1993), Radcliffe (1994), Rose (1996), Morris (1996), and (Doel 1999) among many others, I found a curious discursive spark ignited within and I was inspired and given the confidence to be creative and open to possibilities. Similarly, the political antics and creative geographical adventures33 of bell hooks (1994), JK Gibson-Graham (1994), Women and Geography Study Group, also known as WGSG (1984) and Ian Cook et al. (2000) among others, have all stood testimony to the diverse ways in which one might enact political activism. The nature of romantic, humanistic and radical political precursors led me to think

creatively about my own path – and something hinted at an ongoing relationship with space and place – somewhere intrinsically creative, yet always political.

30 _{By this I refer to the phenomenological, more romantic scholars of humanistic geography, among}

whom Tuan, Seamon, Relph and Buttimer were prominent. Humanistic geographers were taken to task for ignoring questions of political and structural agency (see Cresswell 2012).

31

Radical and ‘new cultural’ geography, made up of and informed by Marxist and Feminist critiques (among others), was significant in its desire for change as integral to the process of doing research.

32 _{Post-structuralism critiqued the nature of boundaries around categories and the reliance on}

traditional binaries (nature/culture, for example) as tools to stabilise meaning (see Derrida (1978 [1967]) and Foucault (1970 [1966]) for example).

110 Representation is one’s ontological vantage point. It is how one sees the world. The slippage then becomes multiple – between the word and the thing being represented and between the various sensory bodies. Let’s dance! What is there to lose?

What I have shown is that representation itself and what representation seeks to represent is not actually fixed and static; rather, representation and what is

represented are unfixed, porous and fluid. Representation is a grasp at creating some stability in an ever moving world. It is to these resulting representations that we cling in searching for a reality that we can all understand; understand each other and the world in which we live. Rather than try to lock the world in a captured moment, like a photograph, non-representational thinking seeks to run with the ever moving moment of the present. Rather than drawing lines around people and places and classifying them and categorising them, practitioners of non-representational

thinking move with their subjects, or make their selves the subject, and try to glimpse the moment of the occurrence. Rather than classify the subject as a this or a that and draw conclusions based on the sum of the this-that-ness, they observe individuals – unique individuals, who make patterns, draw lines – lines that are not circles, lines that do not circumscribe.

William Cunningham wrote in 1559 that the role of “geographie … is the imitation, and description of the face, and picture of th’earth” (Chapple 1993, p. 112). From the outset, then, representation has sat at the centre of what geography is and does. How we configure representation as a concept is imperative for the outcomes that are created. In recent geographical debates, the development and use of non-

representation theories have made significant inroads into experimental representation. It is to this set of theories and ideas that I now turn.