Streams of Writing From a Fluid City

Abstract

What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a time when the effects of environmental damage are becoming increasingly more visible and flooding our daily lives in unpredictable and sometimes devastating ways, how do qualitative methods of research and writing respond to current environmental challenges? This article discusses an arts-science-education collaboration titled fluid city, which disseminates critical research on water ecology to the wider public of Auckland City, New Zealand, through creative and performative means. An experimental approach to narrative washes through the style of this article in an attempt to have the encounter of reading flow with the logic of ecological thinking and liquid perception.

Keywords

arts-science-education collaboration sustainability water research liquid perception experimental writing ecology

the water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination

—Ivan Illich (1985, p. 24)

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at this point of beginning we have a request we’d like you to read this with a glass of water beside you and to transfer the water from cup to cells for the passage of time that you spend with this article also to notice a fluid body the slight moisture of fingertips meeting cup or glass (glass is also a fluid, moving inconceivably slowly) viscosity of eyeballs spiraling of bones allowing the progress of every movement blood supporting organs the rolling tide as you swallow

2

this is a story about an event about a tiny and transient city this is a story about all of our transient cities all of our transient bodies it’s a story about water and research and pedagogy and art it’s a story about an attempt it’s a story about an attempt to evoke something so embedded in the daily life of all living beings that (in this city of auckland at least) it seems to be habitually taken forgranted it’s a story about an attempt to have research move beyond the languages and walls of the university into forms that evoke the imaginations of all sorts of people as they move with and around their city

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this writing aims to evoke a sense of liquid perception¹ that follows streams and flows passage and connectivity and as such draws on the writing style of poet david antin who describes his style of writing against standard prose traditions as “dispensing with its nonfunctional markers regular capitalization most punctuation marks and right and left justification which i see as merely marking proprietry and making a dubious claim to right thinking and right writing” (Antin, 2005, p. x) antin’s poetics form a creative resource in this attempt to evoke in the tone and structure of a text the logic of fluids resisting the territorial resource based thinking encapsulated in logics of ownership and privatization an undercurrent of this writing evokes form or style as a materialization of thinking drawing on gilles deleuze who emphasizes the active way in which ideas come alive through a style of language

one’s always writing to bring something to life to free life from where it’s trapped to trace lines of flight the language for doing that can’t be a homogeneous system it’s someth-ing unstable always heterogeneous in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass come to pass a spark can flash and break out of language itself to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words things we were hardly aware existed (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141)

this emphasis on style highlights the processual nature of writing just as a focus on fluid perception re envisages the city in terms of movements connecting spaces

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so there are some questions that may emerge what kind of city? how and why all of our transient cities and bodies? what do you mean by the logic of fluids?

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once upon a time a tiny and transient city named fluid city was created by an urban planner an architect two choreographers a microbiologist a geomorphologist and a critical educator who wanted to find a way to connect the people of their city with academic research on critical water issues² through an arts-science-education collaboration comprising research on water ecology in the city of auckland, new zealand

the fluid city is anchorless mobile³ taking the form of three cupboard-like structures towed by bicycles each cupboard opening out to invite passersby in a busy public space to view a film test water in a mini science laboratory follow a site specific choreographic performance listen through headphones to different voices sharing different meanings of what water is⁴ share their meanings memories and concerns about water through writing and drawing on postcards contribute this writing to a kind of washing line in the city space a tapestry of stories and issues and thoughts and pictures of water reflecting a multiplicity of meanings and issues a flow of bodies don labcoats select samples are guided by a microbiologist to see the usually invisible microbial worlds of their waterways active colourful alive and full of creatures finding out what the microbial populations of the water mean for the streams forming veins through bodies of place following characters through a dance and audio work evoking the invisible stories of a reclaimed harbor through movement narrative poetry and sound

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the impulse behind the fluid city project was to create a space for celebration and consideration of water as a material and symbolic substance we wondered

what is the role of the academy in facilitating environmental awareness? how might different academic disciplines come together to better understand not only what key research issues and the methodologies for working with them are but how the wider public may be engaged to better understand and act upon research that relates to them? for us this involved working across academic disciplines to consider what the important water issues for aucklanders may be and how these issues might be made lively and meaningful to evoke curiosity and open space for thinking ecologically about the city and the place of water in it⁵ a premise of fluid city is that the arts play a vital role in communicating issues of sustainability in innovative ways that capture public imagination and provoke alternative visions of the city psychologist niki harré discusses the felt affects environmental messages deliver and the difference between whether an issue is communicated so as to evoke fear or optimism indifference or change her research highlights that positive thinking creates conceptual space for new ways of doing that the emotions of curiosity enchantment and anticipation are the most powerful tools in facilitating sustainability

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so we are claiming that the big picture issues of this article relate to all of our transient bodies and cities because every living body on this earth regardless of life form depends on water like story or family or weather water filters our lives water meanings transmute through material symbolic spiritual and recreational spaces⁶ anthropologist veronica strang writes “because of its literal essentiality, its formal qualities and its ubiquitous presence, the core meanings and values encoded in water are extraordinarily powerful” (p. 245) and the politics of water ownership are potentially the most divisive international political issue we have facing us all “nothing on earth, not even land is more contested” (Strang, 2004, p. 1) water is also so much a part of our every day that the need for consideration as to how we use it and care for it can easily slip away from us

imagine you are sitting on an upturned yellow bucket you have a postcard in each of your hands one asks you to “share a water story (or drawing or poem or picture)” the other asks “what do you think are important water issues for auckland city?”

the following text distills and translates the contributions of over eighty visitors who gifted their postcards to the fluid city washing line the themes and turns of phrase that form it are drawn from a vast array of different kinds of writing from pre schoolers just learning to write to the most eloquent and learned penmanship and sentence structure⁷

remembering water

conjures family mortality rest holidays

times where life is full of the heart of living

water should be worshipped

as our ultimate gift

our source of life itself

as strong and nimble as a panther

precious endangered powerful beyond belief

being in the water is like having a hug from the planet

a dream space

healing cleansing purifying

connecting

yet

the travel of rubbish is endless the quantities of plastic and of waste

from farms industry households roads

makes the toxicity of seas and waterways a terrible reality

(cigarette filters in a snapper’s⁸ belly)

we have quantity but are so quickly

losing

quality

(once I saw an eel attempting to make its way up a tiny scum infested creek near my house)

a simple and profound lack of appreciation haunts our water

as it roams the tides of our lives the edges of our city

the structure of our cells the quality of our being

(keeping the oceans, lakes and rivers clean for future generations should be number one)

reflecting on sorting through and writing out of the postcards that were created by visitors to the fluid city evokes the hundreds of people that came across this project the wide range of contributions taught us a huge amount about water in this city the drawings from children only two or three years old of the beach or the creek by their house the scratchy handwriting of their grandparents evoking memories of waterways irrevocably changed the practical handwriting of passionate aucklanders who care deeply about the city and are enormously knowledgeable about what we can do to improve it while deeply frustrated by the seeming apathy of the city as a whole the environmental degradation that is occurring in our city and in cities across the planet incites anger passion desire to change

it is our hope that in evoking the fluid city research project this article contributes to bodies of methodologies concepts ideas and frameworks on interdisciplinary research in environmental sustainability the authors of this article leafed in surprise as we searched for a recent article in qualitative inquiry on environment or ecology and qualitative research and we found that environmental or ecological sustainability is a relatively rarely covered topic of research for thinkers in qualitative methods at the present moment much more popular are topics focused on human rights human emotions and human social justice

which had us considering a potential paradigm shift in qualitative research from “human rights” to “biotic rights” a term coined by performance academic baz kershaw discussing the rights of all living species among which humans are one animal among many biotic forms and how that would effect the field of qualitative research

in the grand scheme of earthly things human beings are still a tiny percentage of total living creatures even if we exclude bacteria and other microscopic organisms what’s more we humans are dependent on them so taking that as a scientifically factual basis of biotic rights has profound implications for any conception of human rights in respect of environmentalism and for the purposes of my argument i invite readers to temporarily adopt this perspective on non-human biotic rights in an environment of global warming produced by homo sapiens from that standpoint

human rights might look like yet another sick joke of modernism and postmodernism gone wrong or perhaps, pace bateson, like a profoundly paradoxical kind of insanity (Kershaw, 2012, p. 268)

such a paradigm shift involves thinking ecologically following gregory Bateson (1972) ecologies consider the interrelationship of material and conceptual forms wherein all elements in an ecology impact on all others and as such the style or form through which ideas move such as the writing style of this article have ecological impact in terms of the travel of affects and the modes of thinking they engender

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have you finished your glass of water yet? did you feel the transfer as liquid became body? the hydration of brain the feeding of blood? this story s only conclusion is its intention to keep moving as the fluid city maps a tour to visit a series of schools plans its residency in an art event in a regional park on a river in serious need of revitalization to grow the momentary residents of a transient city gathering stories of water and celebrating its value here and everywhere

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Fluid City project was funded by Transforming Cities: Innovations for Sustainable Futures, a Thematic Research Initiative of The University of Auckland.

Notes

Author Biographies

Alys Longley (lecturer, Dance Studies Programme, The University of Auckland) is a performance maker, researcher, and teacher with a primary focus on writing and experimental documentation in performance making. Her research foci include practice-led research, interdisciplinary projects, ethnography, narrative research, somatic education methods, and inclusive dance education.

Katie Fitzpatrick is a senior lecturer in health and physical education in the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. Her current research interests include critical approaches to health and physical education, the politics and pedagogies of health in schools, critical ethnography, poetry and representation, and youth participatory methods.

Charlotte Šunde is a research fellow at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a research development manager of the Transforming Cities urban research initiative. With an academic background in environmental planning, her research enquiry has focused on the need for genuine cross-cultural understanding across different worldviews through dialogue and shared experiences, particularly in relation to the environment. This has developed over 15 years of research work, principally in New Zealand, Canada and France.

Clark Ehlers is research development manager for the Centre for Microbial Innovation at the University of Auckland. Clark is a microbiologist and his research interests fall within the broad applied and environmental microbiology space including resource recovery from waste streams, discovery of novel microbes and wastewater treatment technology. He also has an interest in cross-disciplinary research methodology that can lead to new solutions for contemporary environmental problems.

Rosemary Martin is a lecturer in dance studies at The University of Auckland. She is a former dancer with the Royal New Zealand Ballet and has also taught dance extensively within New Zealand and the southern Mediterranean region. Rose has articles in the Journal of Dance Education and Research in Dance Education, and is co-author of the book, Talking Dance: Contemporary histories from the Southern Mediterranean (2013).

Carol Brown is an internationally established performer, choreographer and dance scholar. Her work takes place at the intersections between choreography, architecture, technology and sound and involves sustained collaborative processes. Carol is an associate professor in dance studies at the University of Auckland and a visiting reader in choreography at Roehampton University, London.

Professor Gary Brierley is Chair of Physical Geography in the School of Environment at The University of Auckland. His research focuses on the use of river science to guide effective management practices, with particular emphasis upon river rehabilitation and conservation initiatives.

Kathy Waghorn works across art, architecture and urbanism. She is a lecturer in architecture at The University of Auckland and is carrying out a PhD through the RMIT School of Architecture and Design in Melbourne.

References

Antin

(2005). I never knew what time it was. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bateson

(1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Clarke

(2010). Living Waterscapes: The practice of water in everyday life. Performance Research: A journal of the performing arts, 15, 115-122.

Deleuze

(1986). Cinema 1. London, England: Continuum.

Deleuze

(1995). Negotiations 1972-1990 ( Tomlinson

, trans.). New York, NY: Colombia University Press.

Harré

(2011). Psychology for a better world: strategies to inspire sustainability. Auckland, New Zealand: Department of Psychology, University of Auckland.

Illich

(1985). H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness: reflections of the historicity of stuff. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Kershaw

(2012). Performance ecologies, biotic rights and retro-modernisation. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 17, 265-287.

Strang

(2004). The meaning of water. Oxford, UK: Berg.