Jacob Bull

The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in the countryside

Memories are crucial to our construction of place. They simultaneously offer an anchor for identity and different temporalities to encounters with landscapes. Memory allows different spaces, pasts, and futures to become embedded in particular locales. Yet the spontaneous assemblages of meaning that memory enables are not apolitical. Thus the mechanisms and processes by which meaning is articulated in these encounters are fundamental to our understandings of place. This paper, therefore, brings together the work of Henri Bergson on memory and Paul Ricoeur on narrative, to examine the stories individuals produce which define the self. By drawing on research into the lives of young people in the countryside, the paper does three things: it discusses the role of memory in creating identity; it examines the political process of narrative by which memories become woven into understandings of place and create a bricolage of the here; and finally, it offers the ‘storied-self’ as a resolution of the competing constructions and experiences of personal continuity and the inconsistencies and constant change in the project of the individual.

Encountering fish, flows, and waterscapes through angling

This paper examines the material intertwinings of fish and water. It discusses how the presence of water and fish is simultaneously material and immaterial and examines how the processes and tensions between narratives of fish and water are caught up and inform human encounters with waterscapes. In particular, the paper does three things: first, it highlights the tensions between the angling literature and the practices and performances of angling. Second, it examines how fish embody the material and imaginative aspects of waterscapes, highlighting how fish are shaped to fit in or adapt to ‘environmental quality’ and human expectations. Third, it examines how water may be thought through as ‘fishy’ as made animate by the creatures that dwell there.

Toxic Skin and Animal Mops: : Ticks and Humanimal Vulnerabilities

This chapter draws attention to bodily boundaries between species of bacteria and the bodies of ticks, pets and humans, examining how ‘spot-on’ treatments for protection against ticks and fleas are used to protect human and companion animal bodies, relationships, and spaces from the threats of parasites. Such threats, it is argued, are controlled on the bodies of pets through the creation of ‘toxic skin’ that comes to serve as a protective boundary between human bodies and spaces and the threats of parasites. Suggesting that the parasitic relation can be used as an analytical tool for engaging with the politics of multispecies codependencies, the chapter addresses how parasitic relations challenge notions of human exceptionalism and the integrity of bodily boundaries. It demonstrates how spot-on treatments respond to such challenges by drawing lines through and around relations between human and non-human-animal bodies premised on the priority of particular bodily perspectives and ways of relating. The chapter concludes with the consideration that ticks, in spite of being an unwelcome parasite conceptualised and experienced as a threat, may be seen as the companion species par excellence as they bind together and are bound with a multitude of other species.

Illdisciplined Gender: Nature/Culture and Transgressive Encounters

I set out to critically engage with the concept transgressive encounters. Given the heritage and weighty presence of the term transgression in Feminist, Queer, Trans and Gender Studies debate, such a discussion would be a review of Gender Studies. From activism to texts, we can trace the multiple heritages, ties and examples of transgression within the broad category of gender research: the historical moments where particular forms of gendered power have been successfully challenged; reinterpreting, refracting and redirecting the production of knowledge; operating as a conduit between different academic disciplines; engaging issues outside of disciplinary domains; and subversive bodily acts and the fleshy politics of everyday life; thinking and doing gender research is a transgressive act. I do not want to draw a line between academic debate and activism. Thinking is, after all, doing, and doing generates new knowledge as exemplified by scholars such as Gayatri Spivak who have constantly crossed between ‘activism’ and ‘academic’ (see, e.g., Spivak 1999). This is not to suggest that all transgressions are similar but to emphasise how they share a common thread, providing critical perspectives and articulating different questions. Gender Studies has shifted across academic and disciplinary boundaries and occupied spaces in the borderlands between disciplines, on fringes, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the academy as well as in dedicated research institutes and departments. In a description of ‘intellectual activism’, Patricia Hill Collins (2013) describes two core mechanisms by which lines are blurred between activism and the academy. These two mechanisms are ‘speaking truth to power’ and ‘speaking truth to people’. The contributions to this volume might sit most squarely in the former – they speak from within the academy, from a particular context, and they offer the experience of doing interdisciplinary research in particular spaces.

Images of Cows, Stories of Gender

Beginning from a series of miscommunications, misunderstandings and seemingly incongruous connections, this chapter explores how three trans- or interdisciplinary areas of research might meet. By exploring the way that cattle are depicted in trade magazines, the chapter discusses how perspectives informed by gender studies, animal studies and rural development might examine how animals are both mirrors of rural gender relations and active in them. Such meetings of different perspectives might help to build towards more sustainable rural futures as they challenge the way that gendered narratives have implications for individual farmers. In addition the chapter points to ways that these narratives have material impacts as animal caretaking and the bodies of individual animals are shaped in response to these gendered narratives.