The estuary framed and reframed: enabling multi-perspectival epistemologies in research methodology

The estuary framed and reframed: enabling multi-perspectival epistemologies in research methodology

I am an Environmental Humanities scholar exploring modes of enquiry that can enable more-than-human involvement and communication. I have adopted an ontological and epistemological approach that allows for multiple material semiotic framings that enfold or entangle across interpretive processes. This paper will outline this material semiotic onto-epistemology through framing and reframing an estuary as emerging from the material semiotic workings of filter-feeding oysters. The approach is readily transferrable into other research contexts; for example, educational enquiry. Far from the passive lifeforms they are often imagined to be, oysters employ complex mechanisms involving the effortful work of cilia, gills and muscles to enable particles from the water current to find their way to their digestive systems. Over evolutionary time, these bodies have changed in response to the characteristics of viscous flow and tidal rhythm. Their bodies have become engineers of flow, designing flow in ways that clear the water and build biologically rich mudbanks able to support a wide diversity of tidal life. In comparing and sorting beneficial and non-beneficial aspects of the world according to its own estimations, an oyster actively creates the criteria differentiating mudbank from water. This difference becomes interpretable and performable by others in diverse ways.