Wetlands as Learning-Creation Sites for Wild Ecologies

This paper explores the multiple stories and affective traces that wetlands and swamps generate in more-than-human environments. Situated on what was once a swamp, Naarm (Melbourne) provides the setting for the authors’ collective creative inquiry. This work explores more-than-human methodologies of knowledge creation, examines how these approaches impact multispecies justice and investigates how wetlands can serve as transitional, unstaged spaces that challenge and disrupt colonial infrastructures. While drawing back on memories and experiences of wetlands in Southern China and Southeast Europe, the authors incorporate poetic mappings and autoethnographic interviews in exploring the reminisces and encounters living with more-than-human pasts and presents. Following the way of wetlands, the authors seek to foster unexpected ecologies between water, land, species and a multiplicity of ontologies in the abundance of in-between spaces as a generative learning-creation site.