Sensing the River Torne: Luminous Encounters in the Riverine Archive

This article explores the luminous exchanges that animate contemporary Western geoscience ways of imagining the Earth. Inquiring into fluvial geomorphology, it employs creative research practice and feminist materialist ideas to interrogate the multiple roles of light in the ways in which rivers become configured, envisioned, and known. Focusing on the River Torne in northern Finland and Sweden, the article contemplates creative gestures of sensing the Torne via various “technologies of light,” which draw the researcher into a haunted, intra-active, and ecological exchange with the riverscape. This immersive engagement with the Torne prompts reflection on the particular riverine knowledges, ecologies, and archives that become presenced in luminous research encounters—prompting a recognition of a distributed cognition in our practices of knowing riverscapes. In the process, the geomorphological notion of a riverscape archive becomes situated amid complex ecologies of light, which invites a radical commitment to the memory and lively potentiality of place and encourages care-full research entanglements within our luminous research archives.