Speculative Harbouring: Wading into Critical Pedagogy and Practices of Care

Abstract

This text explicates a particular pedagogical event—Speculative Harbouring—a postgraduate workshop in which students from different disciplines formed around concerns of how we might better care for, and with, urban harbours. The harbour we attended to is presently referred to as Blackwattle Bay, which is a site in Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia currently undergoing significant redevelopment. The purpose of the workshop, or rather walkshop, was two-fold: to introduce participants to research practices from a range of disciplines, and to construct a field-guide to highlight ways in which Blackwattle Bay is, has, and might be, inhabited, cared for (or not) and the complex ecological and social demands this creates. To begin the walkshop, participants each shared a different method for examining place from their disciplinary field. During the twoday event, these different methods were activated through the practice of walking and were used to produce the Speculative Harbouring Field-Guide to Blackwattle Bay. In our discussion, we draw on feminist practices and politics of care, in particular, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s articulation of “matters of care,” alongside Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” and notions of critical public pedagogy, to examine ways in which walking and reflecting can attune people to learning to care and how a field guide might facilitate such attuning.