Ecologising the Research Image: Methods of Knowledge Creation with Forestscapes

Abstract The emerging field of critical forest studies necessitates more-than-human approaches to knowledge creation with forestscapes that makes their complex and expansive relationships sensible. This calls for a new ecological reading of the research image, and in turn, a new image of research which attends to Indigenous and place-based connections across bodies, geographies and temporalities. This paper explores this new political ontology of the image as a process of ecologisation that works towards decolonising ends. By putting machine imaging technologies such as drone footage, thermal imaging and spectrograms into conversation with Indigenous painting and storytelling practices, we endeavour to express ecological processes which often go unseen within forests. Our speculative analysis of these images disrupts modernist separations of difference from sameness, body from environment, myth from science and imagining from empirical fact, proposing pedagogies which connect material and metaphysical dimensions of sensing and learning with forests.