Writing with Damiana: Attunement, Co-Becoming, and Co-Authorship With and Alongside Plant Thinking

This article is an autoethnographic account of a relationship between a human and a plant, exploring frameworks of co-becoming, research as apprenticeship, and practices of attunement as pathways to co-authorship between humans and the more-than-human. Written by a human and a plant, Damiana, the manner in which the article is written articulates the playful traversal between humanness and plantness as manifested in the context of written language. Three registers are projected - the academic, the human, and the plant - with fragmentation as a fourth proposed register, facilitated by requirements of particularly human modes of articulation. Plant studies and more-than-human co-authorship challenge notions of what is possible and impossible in knowledge-dissemination practices. Learning to engage with more-than-human modes of encounter activates the scholar's sensuous body to an embodied relationality that fosters ethics of care and respect. This article serves as a starting point to explore more practical applications of such methodologies and co-authorship practices while first situating the researcher as an embodied participant in knowledge creation, learning, and dissemination.