Borrowed connectivity: A fictocritical enquiry

This paper is a fictocritical examination of my current research in/with/for the Nightcap National Park, which both argues for, and provides a material example of, the value of the fictocritical form for the interdisciplinary study of place and its place beings. Research within the environmental humanities, with its feminist influences, in critiquing the dualistic proposition at the heart of most Euro-patriarchal research, necessarily troubles the enforcement of the structures of both research methodology and knowledge creation. Creativecritical writing collapses the artificial, binary separation between critical and creative forms and, through its neologic construction, interrogates the primacy of critical thought. Research which explores embodied thinking, entanglements, co-becomings and coproduction of knowledge/s is only possible from a non-dualistic cosmological position, making it incapable of meeting the paradigmatic demand for objectivity which characterises most normative academic enquiry. Rather than diminishing the value of such research, this divergence liberates the researcher to explore alternative responses to the inquiry. Fictocriticism seeks to understand theory through embodiment, placing the researcher squarely in the field of study, always and already entangled. The fictocritical form represents both the process, and the product of the research.