This is the epilogue to the podcast series "Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley." Judee reflects on the process of doing interdisciplinary, public-facing fire research in the form of a podcast, and on being guided by feminist values.
This is the epilogue to the podcast series "Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley." Judee reflects on the process of doing interdisciplinary, public-facing fire research in the form of a podcast, and on being guided by feminist values.
This podcast series explores the ways that fire history informs present and future ways of living with and understanding fire in and around the Okanagan Valley. “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” was created by Judith Burr as her master's thesis project in the Digital Arts & Humanities theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. This work was supported by UBC-Okanagan’s feminist digital humanities lab, the AMP Lab. This project was also supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) through UBC Okanagan’s “Living with Wildfire” Project. This podcast was created on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.
SHOW NOTES
The music in this episode is “Set the Tip Jar” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/121831.
See my thesis background document – “Listening to Fire Naturecultures: A Feminist Academic Podcast of Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” – for a more complete theorization of these values and the way they have shaped my research design and practice. It will be available by fall 2022 on UBC’s digital repository for research materials: https://circle.ubc.ca.
I actually misread the date when I was making this personal reflection recording, it was actually January 14, 2022.
More Resources: FireSmart Canada, https://firesmartcanada.ca/; Blazing the Trail, https://firesmartcanada.ca/product/blazing-the-trail-celebrating-indigenous-fire-stewardship.; Nature Conservancy, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX), http://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/FireLandscapes/HabitatProtectionandRestoration/Training/TrainingExchanges/Pages/fire-training-exchanges.aspx; Karuk Climate Change Projects, “Fire Works!,” https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.com/fire-works; NC State University, “Prescribed Burn Associations,” https://sites.cnr.ncsu.edu/southeast-fire-update/prescribed-burn-associations; Firesticks Alliance, https://www.firesticks.org.au.
More Fire Podcasts: Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew Kristoff (Hosts), Good Fire Podcast, https://yourforestpodcast.com/good-fire-podcast; Amanda Monthei (host), Life with Fire Podcast, https://lifewithfirepodcast.com; Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski (hosts), “On Fire: Camas, Cores, and Spores (Part 1),” Future Ecologies Podcast, August 29, 2018, https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-5-on-fire-pt-1.
Recording from the north shore of Massachusetts, March 20, 2021: [00:00:00]
[Door opening and Atlantic ocean sounds]
Judee Burr, Narration: [00:00:11]
Doing interdisciplinary public-facing fire research is not easy. [Music begins[1]] I have used academic podcasting as a way to design my own research approach, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why podcasting works for me. As a queer feminist, I’ve connected this approach to some feminist values that have guided my work. As I’ve thought about my podcasting methods, there are 6 particular values that I’ve learned from a number of feminist traditions that I’ve tried to apply in this work. They are: (1) paying attention to distributions of power and marginalized perspectives; (2) telling more-than-human stories; (3) doing research that values relationality, embodiment, and emotion; (4) doing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research; (5) valuing local, place-based research; and (6) valuing research that connects to practice and possibilities for action and change in the world.
Judee Burr, Narration: [00:01:12]
I spend a lot of time in the background document to my thesis project exploring the feminist traditions that these values are connected to for me. And I think the idea listening brings these values together in podcasting – both theoretically and practically.[2] Foregrounding questions and conversations in this podcast has been a way of staying with these values and embracing the uncertainties in fire research and management. When we don’t purport to know exactly what to do, in the confident way expert knowledge is often communicated, we create a space that can welcome new ideas.
Judee Burr, Narration: [00:01:53]
As part of my research process, I recorded audio reflections as a way of processing my thoughts and feelings out loud. I take my own uncertainty seriously – some of it is part of being a student, a newcomer, and some of it is the actual difficulty of thinking with and through disciplines and outside of them, and the difficulty of drawing conclusions about how to live with fire. I’m going to conclude this work by sharing some of these clips. These are scenes from the vulnerability of this public-knowledge research process, and a way of sharing the challenges and contradictions that – of course – remain. [Music ends]
Judee Burr, Recording reflection in Kelowna, BC, December 30, 2022: [00:02:38]
I just am seeing this headline: hundreds of homes burned. Tens of thousands evacuated in fire said to be most destructive in Colorado history. It's December 30th. How is the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history burning on December 30th 2021 in the middle of winter? Apparently, this first sentence says: a wind-fueled grass fire in Colorado burned hundreds of homes in a matter of hours and forced thousands to evacuate Thursday. I just texted my friend and said how are you doing? Are you okay? It's weird to have been reading about fire for so long and still not understand. I have no idea what's going to happen when. Like, I don't know whether this is normal or not. And trying to make sense of. It is so hard. And so heart-wrenching. What perspective do I personally, Judee Burr from Rhode Island, you know, with all of my particular Environmental Studies and creative writing and audio making experiences. What do I bring to this research? And it's only one little piece, it's only one little form of analysis.
Judee Burr, Recording reflection in Kelowna, BC, January 14, 2022: [00:02:38]
Midnight. January 22nd.[3] Fire thoughts. Is there an incompatibility with trying to channel my feminist values into this project, and also spending this much time trying to understand the dominant paradigm of wildfire management and research…Fire science, organized wildfire management, governmental organizations and male-dominated industry emergent from the same colonial organizations that created the fire suppression force that got us into the situation. Because there are structures of oppression that are amplifying particular kinds of bodies and voices and silencing others, like that's literally physically materially happening. And it needs head-on confrontation. But I've also been interested in disciplinary vocal inclusion and diversity, like, yeah, what happens if we bring all these perspectives together? But again, I'm realizing how much my “eat the rainbow,” “bring all the voices in” is still not doing enough to notice which voices have historically been excluded. That doesn't counter all of the forces, the structural forces that have pushed aside some stories and amplified others. So I need to talk about that. And think about that when I structure my story.
Judee Burr, Recording reflection near Kelowna, BC, January 19, 2022: [00:06:37]
Ok, I’m driving and having some reflective thoughts. I felt like I kind of lost control of the interview. The space was echo-y, I wasn't getting really good sound. I think I was a little bit distracted by that and we had a hard time constraint at the end. And I think I felt a little intimidated. But so I'm just driving back to UBC to return the equipment, and I was just listening to Hannah McGregor’s secret feminist agenda. And it just is really remarkable the way that podcasting, in the way that Hannah does it and I think in the way that it'll come through in my conversations, it's so situates the interviewer as a fellow learner and kind of two people journeying through a conversation. I feel like there's some feminist importance to that, and when I say feminist importance, I mean good alignment with my own values and I use the word feminist for that a lot of the time these days. It's just something about the solution is not inside me, even if I do all of the good work of theorizing and read everything multiple times. And I download all that information into my mind and be able to tell you about every fire, what year they happened, and where the fire years ranked, and what all the ecosystems in the Okanagan are, and how they changed over time. Even if I had all of that information in my body, that wouldn't solve this complex multiplayer question about – how do we live in this fire-adapted landscape? Like it's not my project to solve. Is it because I asked a bad question that I can't personally solve? Does that mean it's a bad research question?
Thankfully, I'm in an interdisciplinary program where it's actually a very relevant question about what interdisciplinarity can do and mean, and what interdisciplinary thinking can contribute. I think this aspect of listening to me learn in these interviews – yeah, it'll probably be embarrassing…for me. [Laughs] But this learning mind is actually the way to be open enough to do something differently as a community, as an Okanagan community. I just feel so kind of out of my depth asking these questions so much of the time. Like, I should be. Because I wasn't born here. But I also felt out of my depth asking those questions in Rhode Island where, okay, I was born there. But parents weren’t born there, my grandparents weren't born there. I was born on land that was has so much violent history to it: from the marginalization and oppression of Narragansett people to, its embeddedness in the slave trade. And I am a direct beneficiary of all the policies of white supremacy that made my life – normal in Rhode Island. Where we now call Rhode Island, in the so-called United States. I'm a beneficiary of all that. So I really am of a generation of settlers that have a really complicated relationship to land and its history of violence. And I also have a particular penchant for moving around the country and the world, and just a curious mind and I want to know how did things work here, and I have curiosity about people and landscapes. So, what role can I play from this position that I occupy?
Judee Burr, Recording reflection in Kelowna, BC, January 21, 2022: [00:12:04]
I'm walking to Bright Jenny now, to just kind of get outside. I’ve just been spending so much time inside trying to process information and learning about the world that way, instead of this actually walking outside in the Okanagan. And the kind of hard to pin down learning that actually happens when I do that. Yeah, it's – I feel so intimidated by this process of producing…a conclusion. [Music begins[4]]
I think – I was listening to the book, Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong. And she was talking about something that one of her teachers said – it was actually about writing about race and racism. And the professor said to her that when the material is difficult, the work should be difficult. I don't know if those are the exact words, but it was something like that. That really encapsulated this idea of the product of grappling with a really hard question is not straightforward. What I'm doing right now, it's not straightforward. [Music ends]
[1] “Set the Tip Jar” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/121831.
[2] See my thesis background document – “Listening to Fire Naturecultures: A Feminist Academic Podcast of Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” – for a more complete theorization of these values and the way they have shaped my research design and practice. It will be available by fall 2022 on UBC’s digital repository for research materials: https://circle.ubc.ca.
[3] I actually misread the date when I was making this personal reflection recording, it was actually January 14.
[4] “Set the Tip Jar” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/121831.