Situating skill: contemporary observational drawing as a spatial method in geographical research

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this article, I review an experiment in posthumanist fieldwork. The purpose of the experiment is to draw out a multi-species politics of nature and land use in the Huleh Wetlands marking the northern tip of the Jordan Rift Valley.1 Here, associations unfolding between text and image are presented as work in progress – a hybrid between traditional academic writing and the artists’ crit session.2 My intention is to test out emergent ideas about the potential of observational drawing,3 as a method for attunement to spatial, temporal, material and cultural relations that play out in the ‘storying’ of a landscape. The experiment extends recent methodological invention in cultural geographical research,4 informed by an interest in art’s generative function of opening up a ‘space to reconnect’ with the nonhuman world.5 The specific skilled practice of observational drawing, despite its long history as a primary mode of research in geography and the natural sciences, remains underexplored in this contemporary context.6