Drawing as research: drawing emplaced animals
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: There is contemporary interest in drawing practice as a research method in geography. This paper gathers aligned insights from visual studies and geography to deconstruct humanistic processes involved in researcher seeing and representation. Seeing is critiqued as a socio-cultural practice that can affirm intersectional injustices and suffering. I argue that to resist humanist interpretations of the more-than-human world, it is necessary to both de-territorialise the researcher self, and the research practice. I demonstrate that drawing performed as a becoming practice, offers one way to move towards a de-territorialisation approach and to conduct field research with a posthuman sensibility. The research is an example of a feminist research assemblage involving processual toggling between theory, practice and reflexive analysis. The discussion illuminates the problems of researching emplaced animals elucidated through two case studies that describe drawing a zoo tiger and a city farm cow. The drawing vignettes are introduced as experiments in the capacity for geographical research to attend to subjects through loosening the humanistic regimes of seeing and representation.
Source: Cultural Geographies
Author: Harriet Smith
Institution: Cardiff University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,650
OpenAlex ID: W7130391924
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