Arboreal Methodologies: Getting Lost to Explore the Potential of the Non-innocence of Nature

Abstract

This paper recounts a workshop that took place in a polytunnel in a forest school in Sligo, North-West Ireland on a cold day in early-December. The event sought to materialize ‘arboreal methodologies’ (Osgood, 2019; Osgood & Odegard, 2022; Osgood & Axelsson, 2023) which are characterized by the enactment of feminist new materialist praxis to engage in world-making practices (Haraway, 2008) intended to unsettle recognizable tropes of biophilia that have come to frame both child and nature in narrow ways. The arboreal methodologies that participants were invited to mobilise were situated, material, affective, and involved metaphorical and material practices of ‘getting lost’. The workshop invited a sense of wonder at the ways arboreal methodologies might offer possibilities to confront human exceptionalism and wrestle with our complex, often contradictory relationships to ‘nature’. The approach taken involves methodologies without method (Koro-Ljunberg, 2016) to bring speculative, embodied encounters in the forest, together with unlikely tales of how forests work on and through us. We pursue a critical, tentacular engagement with the forest and take seriously its potential to agitate familiarity and strangeness, wonder and fear, nature and culture. In this paper we re-encounter embodied becomings-with the forest to think and sense other ways to take life in the Plantationocene (Tsing, 2015) seriously.

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