HGRC Seminar: Laura Pottinger, University of Manchester

You are warmly welcome to join our online Human Geography Research Cluster seminar, in which Laura Pottinger, University of Manchester will present:

Making (slowly) as method in socio-environmental research?

In this talk, I draw on emerging ideas about ‘patchwork ethnography’, an approach mobilising the often multi-sited, fragmented, non-linear character of ethnographic research in practice. I share early findings from an extended six-year study that uses a range of creative and material methods to explore environmental understandings and people-plant relationships in the practice of natural textile dyeing. I ask how the ‘soft’ metaphors of piecing, steeping and stitching might be useful for cultivating gentle, creative and slowly-paced methodological praxis.

Biography:

Laura Pottinger is a research fellow in cultural geography at the University of Manchester. Her research is interested in everyday forms of social and environmental activism, people and plant relationships, craft and cultivation. She draws on creative, participatory and ethnographic methodologies to explore these themes. Her current fellowship research works closely with textile artists and makers to consider the potentials and challenges of slow making.