What Role for More-Than-Representational, More-Than-Human Inquiry?

Human geography has been the site of much methodological experimentation and innovation, particularly when it comes to questions of how -and indeed, whether -to ‘go beyond representation’. Most recently, this latter question has emerged in new ways through the post-humanist/non-representational turn and rise of ‘post-qualitative’ approaches that challenge traditional notions of subjectivity and relationality in geographical research. Methodologically, this movement has seen researchers creatively develop hybrid methods that attempt to capture and report more-than-representational and more-than-human processes and phenomena. This chapter traces the lineage of these ideas, before exploring how – and why – existing geographical methods might be tweaked, extended, or supplemented in order to 1) acknowledge both human and non-human agency, 2) retain fidelity and authenticity to events, accounting for their activity and energy, rather than just explaining them, and 3) highlight that our own research is in every way a performative production that can just as much create change in the world as well as create ideas for the world. Addressing these challenges, requires the invoking of sensory and embodied methods, arts-based practices, performative approaches to narratives, the mobilisation of novel technologies, and indeed, new ways of writing research.