Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge by Jane Speedy, Bronwyn Davies

Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge is not a methods book in the traditional sense, but methodology as lived praxis, and as artistic, poetic worlding. It weaves thoughts and emotions together, through words and paint, through art, literature, poetry, ecology, history and auto-ethnography. It moves back and forth in-between the two authors, Jane and Bronwyn, as they explore their different scholarly approaches to life itself, as they have lived it, imagined it, thought about it, and occasionally argued about it. It is partly historical, wondering how we humans arrived at this point, partly speculative, considering our (im)possible futures, and it is highly personal and intra-personal. It explores the acts of living and dying, not an individualistic living and dying, but the living and dying of the more-than-human, who are of the world, entangled in the matter and mattering of the world. The analysis draws on new materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, ecology, autoethnography, art, literature, and the authors’ own everyday relationality. It seeks to find/forge a new and sometimes hopeful sense of the world, and of thought and action. It does so mindful of the broader context of the new populism being deployed by autocrats, a populism that limits and controls human thought, and with it, creativity and freedom.