Rethinking methodological vulnerability: drawing multispecies settler ecologies in the Huleh wetlands

The phrase ‘methodological vulnerability’ is conventionally used in the negative, denoting liabilities and risk factors to be designed out of research. Yet vulnerability in processes of knowledge production should also be understood as a strength in that it can alter the inherent power dynamics of research encounters. This article develops the proposal that foregrounding vulnerability in research methodologies engenders the possibility of different kinds of relation with a diversity of bodies and ideas. It thereby contributes to critical feminist, anticolonial, queer and posthumanist scholarly commitments to unsettle the ontological premises of fieldwork encounters and to disrupt given orders of structuration of power and knowledge. To support this proposal, the article reviews the use of observational drawing in a study of the encounter between humans and Eurasian cranes in the Huleh wetlands in Northern Israel-Palestine. A practice-led project, the study explored the possibilities of drawing as a method for becoming-vulnerable in multi-species fieldwork and in conflicted landscapes: opening up spaces of encounter with wider ecologies of human and nonhuman bodies and ideas. Building on this case study, the article distinguishes four important senses of ‘vulnerability’ – constitutive, differential, relational and methodological – showing how these manifest in a specific instance of ecologically and politically sensitive fieldwork. In conclusion, it argues that the particular set of open sensibilities which observational drawing enables can usefully be extended by other methods, thereby offering a powerful, though partial, corrective to persistent gendered, anthropocentric and colonial relations of power which continue to exert their influence in geographical fieldwork.