On Hesitation

What does it mean to die well? How does assuming responsibility for killing an animal feel?Who gets to decide who dies, who lives, and who kills? While orienting oneself to regenerating life is typical among small-scale diversified farmers, killing and dying equally present themselves within the everyday cycles of farm life. This essay reflects upon my encounters with animal death and shares experiences from observing and participating in animal slaughter taking the form of a photo-poetic intervention. As a selective collection of field notes, personal reflections, and photographs generated between 2019 and 2023, in this essay I aim to capture the affective side of scholarship and bring forth an alternative way of inquiring into and representing research, one that explicitly invites the reader to sense, feel, and contemplate. Data for this research were generated as part of my ethnographic fieldwork among regeneratively oriented smallholders, small-scale diversified farms, and farming communities in Finland (excluding Sapmi Lapland) and on the colonised lands of Australia. The first part of this essay lays out deadly scenes, the second asks questions, and the third presents a reflection which arose as a result of exchanges with the editorial team of this journal. The fourth part consists of a poem to close the essay. This essay may contain seemingly unpleasant, disturbing, or shocking content. However, beyond simple provocation, I invite the reader to share their bewilderment with me. Because I wish to make visible other ways of knowing through poetic inquiry that extends beyond the impersonalised and distanced (re)presentation of polished evidence, my words fail to hit exact targets as they travel searching for meaning. But I do not use irony nor withhold information. I hesitate: my essay is an invitation to hesitation. Keywords: field notes, ethnography, poetic inquiry, photo-essay, death, killing, reflection, representation, hesitation