Lost World of the Nearby: Minimal Ethics on Govan Graving Docks

Abstract

This article considers what it means to do engaged geohumanities research on a fated landscape. The focus falls on a rewilded ruined landscape in the city of Glasgow, Govan Graving Docks, a significant cultural landscape that now faces contested commercial redevelopment. The article describes a repertoire of salvage-research practices that were staged on the docks between 2013 and 2014, first, to better understand the communities, ecologies, and enduring bonds that stood to lose out to the redevelopment, and second, to make real differences on the ground during a period of environmental volatility and uncertainty. These practices were emergent, urgent, collaborative and public facing, and strongly influenced by Zylinska’s “minimal ethics for the Anthropocene,” which identifies modes of working for contexts in which life is under threat. By identifying the particular challenges that the fated landscape presents to the invested researcher, and the methodological resources that are available to sustain research in contexts of destruction and uncertainty, this article seeks to extend geohumanities capacities to respond to the dispossessions, extinctions, and alienations wrought by the Anthropocene, with a proposal for a creative pragmatics, that can be put to work in instances of local environmental change.