MPhil/PhD student Zoë Quick discusses her research into how a ‘gathering methodology’ can inform renegotiation of the farming-rewilding binary in debate over Welsh mountain Pumlumon.
Abstract
This research reenacts the marginal, female Welsh custom gwlana (wool-gathering) to renegotiate the farming-rewilding binary in debate over the Welsh mountain Pumlumon. As a trope of wasteful transgression in English rhetoric, and resourceful identity in Welsh resistance, gwlana highlights gendered politics of identity and problematic distance between institutional rhetoric and Welsh upland communities. Arguing that gwlana embodies tensions underpinning debate over Pumlumon, this research develops a trans-disciplinary ‘gathering methodology’ through polypraxic reenactment of gwlana.
Enacting collaborative performances of gathering-weaving a blanket and ballads with, and of, Pumlumon, as a ‘multi-species gathering in the making’ (Tsing 2017), it aims to enact and give voice to relations between communities-times-species-institutions-fields marginalised by the farming-rewilding binary. Mining the multiple meanings of gather - collect-assemble-apprehend – this research draws the humanities and arts into ecology and agriculture to renegotiate the farming-rewilding binary, and ask how, through a ‘gathering methodology’, research can listen-to and write-with a mountain.
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