A Human Geography of the Self Archives

References: A Body Is an Ecosystem

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This page lists the verified references for A Body Is an Ecosystem, part of the A Human Geography of the Self series. All citations have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. Corrections from the original post are noted below.

Verified References

Asker, C., & Andrews, G. J. (2020). The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography. Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 64(4), 551–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12639

Fay, G., Coen, S. E., & Lawreniuk, S. (2026). Of life and breath: Towards geographies of breath and breathing bodies. Geography Compass, 20(3), Article e70069. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70069

Hayes-Conroy, J., & Hayes-Conroy, A. (2010). Visceral geographies: Mattering, relating, and defying. Geography Compass, 4(9), 1273–1283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00373.x

Montefusco, G. (2026). Relational food geographies, underwater: Discussing food and oceans’ entanglements along urban waterfronts. Geography Compass, 20(4), Article e70074. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70074

notes

Asker & Andrews (2020) — journal name corrected. The original post cited the journal as “The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien.” CrossRef records show that the journal was renamed Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes beginning with volume 63 (2019). The Asker & Andrews article was published in volume 64 (2020), after the renaming. The corrected citation uses the current journal title.

All other citations in this post verified correct against CrossRef DOI records: authors, year, journal title, volume, issue, and article numbers confirmed.

Verified June 29, 2026 against CrossRef DOI database.

References: Interconnected Precarity as an Ecology

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This page lists the verified references for Interconnected Precarity as an Ecology, part of the A Human Geography of the Self series. All citations have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. Notes on publication dates are included below.

Verified References

Blomley, N. (2020). Precarious territory: Property law, housing, and the socio-spatial order. Antipode, 52(1), 36–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12578

Burridge, A., & Gill, N. (2017). Conveyor-belt justice: Precarity, access to justice, and uneven geographies of legal aid in UK asylum appeals. Antipode, 49(1), 23–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12258

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Grenier, A., Lloyd, L., & Phillipson, C. (2017). Precarity in late life: Rethinking dementia as a “frailed” old age. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39(2), 318–330. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12476

Sangaramoorthy, T. (2018). “Putting Band-Aids on things that need stitches”: Immigration and the landscape of care in rural America. American Anthropologist, 120(3), 487–499. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13054

notes

Blomley (2020) — publication date note. This article was published online 30 September 2019 and appeared in the print issue vol. 52(1) in January 2020. The post’s citation uses 2020, which correctly reflects the print volume year. CrossRef records confirm all other details (authors, title, journal, volume, issue, and pages).

Burridge & Gill (2017) — publication date note. This article was published online 3 August 2016 and appeared in the print issue vol. 49(1) in January 2017. The post’s citation uses 2017, which correctly reflects the print volume year. CrossRef records confirm all other details.

All other citations in this post verified correct against CrossRef DOI records.

Verified June 29, 2026 against CrossRef DOI database.

Interconnected Precarity as an Ecology

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Reading Time: 10 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work on contract academic labour, and on the original concepts I have developed through that research.

“No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. Neither, I have come to believe, are we.”

In Loreto, at the lowest tides, the Sea of Cortez pulls back and leaves a world exposed in the rock. I spent many mornings crouched over those tidepools, watching. A hermit crab depends on a shell another creature has left behind. A small fish shelters in the shade of an anemone that could also sting it. Every life in that basin is held by other lives, fed by them, endangered by them, impossible without them. Pull one thread and the whole pool shifts. No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. Neither, I have come to believe, are we.

I have spent nineteen years inside the precarity of contract academic work, and for most of those years I understood my insecurity as a private misfortune, a personal weather system I had to survive on my own. The tidepool taught me otherwise, and so did human geography. Insecurity, it turns out, behaves like an ecology. It is relational, distributed across linked lives, and profoundly uneven. In my own scholarship I have come to call this interconnected precarity (the idea that no person’s insecurity stands alone, that our vulnerabilities are bound together in a web, the way the lives in a tidepool are bound). This post is about that web, about who it holds and who it sacrifices, and about why seeing precarity as an ecology changes everything.

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Precariousness Is the Water We Live In

The philosopher Judith Butler gave this its deepest grounding. As Grenier, Lloyd, and Phillipson (2017) discuss, Butler argues that our lives have always been defined by precariousness, a state founded on an interdependent web of social support and obligation, so that to live at all is to live socially, with one’s life always in some sense held in the hands of others (Grenier et al., 2017). Butler’s (2004) insight is that exposure is the human condition rather than a personal failure. We are sustained by the very same networks of care, work, and belonging that can also leave us exposed. There is no sealed, self-sufficient self. There is only the tidepool.

Grenier and colleagues (2017) take this somewhere that matters to me. They draw attention to a precariousness that is inherently shared, yet unequally experienced, so that while insecurity is part of every human life, certain lives are far more susceptible to its hazards than others (Grenier et al., 2017). They argue that the honest response is one grounded in an acknowledgement of the fragility and limitation that affect all human lives, and in inclusive forms of belonging built upon that shared condition (Grenier et al., 2017). This is the first turn of the ecological view. Once I understood my own precarity as part of a shared human interdependence rather than a personal flaw, the shame began to lift, and something more useful took its place, which was a sense of common cause.

The Web Is Uneven

If precariousness is shared, precarity itself is distributed with brutal unevenness, and geographers have mapped exactly how. Burridge and Gill (2017), studying asylum seekers cut off from legal aid across an uneven British landscape, draw on Butler to insist on what they call differential exposure (the way some populations are far more exposed to harm than others through political and spatial arrangements rather than through chance). They show that precarity is spatially uneven, that where a person stands, their legal status, and their access to resources all shape how exposed they are, and they caution that the concept of precarity becomes hollow the moment it flattens or erases these differences (Burridge & Gill, 2017). An ecology has niches, and some niches are far more dangerous than others. The tidepool is no democracy.

Then comes the insight that reorganized my whole understanding, and it came from a geographer writing about property. Blomley (2020) argues that precariousness is socially distributed in a very particular way: the security of the privileged to hold land and shelter is produced through, and actually depends upon, the production of precarity for others (Blomley, 2020). He calls this precarious property and shows that the comfortable image of the private castle, the sealed home that protects its owner from all dependency, is an illusion, because all security in land remains relational and revocable, and one person’s stable ground is built on another’s lack of it (Blomley, 2020). As a settler scholar, Blomley (2020) turns this lens on himself, acknowledging that his own access to land rests on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, so that his security and their precarity are the same arrangement seen from two sides (Blomley, 2020).

This is the second concept I have developed in my own work, which I call asymmetrical precarity (the recognition that the web of insecurity is tilted, that some are made secure precisely by the insecurity of others). The tenured position and the contract position are not merely neighbours in an ecosystem. They are linked. The flexibility, the cost savings, and the security of the institution are produced through the disposability of people like me. My precarity was never simply my bad luck. It was someone else’s stability, viewed from underneath.

The Time Tax and the Cost of Staying Afloat

Living in an asymmetrical ecology extracts something from those who occupy its exposed niches, a cost that rarely appears on any ledger. I have come to name one form of it the time tax (the unpaid hours the precarious must spend simply staying afloat, reapplying, reproving their worth, managing an insecurity that the secure never have to think about). The hermit crab spends energy the anemone does not, merely to keep its borrowed shell. Across nineteen years I have paid this tax in evenings, in weekends, in the constant low hum of having to earn my place again and again. Burridge and Gill (2017) describe precisely this drain in the lives they study, the exhausting work of countering one’s own precarious position within a system arranged to keep one uncertain (Burridge & Gill, 2017). The time tax is how an asymmetrical ecology quietly transfers life from the exposed to the secure.

Interdependence as the Ground of Repair

Here is where the ecological view turns from diagnosis toward hope, and it is the reason I hold to it. If precarity is relational, then so is its repair. Sangaramoorthy (2018), studying how immigrants and care providers improvise mutual aid across a threadbare rural landscape, shows that precarity, even as it wounds, also generates circuits of social connection, belonging, and care (Sangaramoorthy, 2018). The very dependence on others that exposure forces upon us becomes, in her account, a profound recognition of our responsibility to one another, and the care that people offer each other inside precarity becomes a political act that opens the possibility of a livable life (Sangaramoorthy, 2018).

This is the deepest lesson of the tidepool. Interdependence is the wound and interdependence is the medicine. The same web that distributes insecurity unevenly is also the only thing strong enough to redistribute security. Grenier and colleagues (2017) call for exactly this, a response rooted in our shared fragility and in obligations of care that the secure owe the exposed (Grenier et al., 2017). My union work, my advocacy for non-regular faculty, my refusal to treat my precarity as a private problem, all of it grows from this single recognition: that we are an ecology, and an ecology survives through its relationships or fails through them.

What the Tidepool Knows

So I have stopped describing my insecurity as personal weather. It is an ecology, interconnected and asymmetrical, in which some are kept afloat by the sinking of others. Naming it that way is not merely an academic exercise. It is the difference between blaming myself and organizing with others. It is the difference between shame and solidarity.

I think often of those mornings crouched over the warm rock in Loreto, watching the held and holding lives in the basin. Every creature there was precarious, and every creature there was also someone else’s shelter, food, or threat. The pool survived because it was a web, and it suffered when the web was torn. We are the same. My precarity is bound to yours, and yours to mine, across the whole tilted ecology of our working and dwelling lives. The work of justice is the work of mending the web so that no one is made secure by another’s drowning. No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. That is the wound, and it is also, if we choose it, the way out.

References

Blomley, N. (2020). Precarious territory: Property law, housing, and the socio-spatial order. Antipode, 52(1), 36-57. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12578

Burridge, A., & Gill, N. (2017). Conveyor-belt justice: Precarity, access to justice, and uneven geographies of legal aid in UK asylum appeals. Antipode, 49(1), 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12258

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Grenier, A., Lloyd, L., & Phillipson, C. (2017). Precarity in late life: Rethinking dementia as a “frailed” old age. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39(2), 318-330. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12476

Sangaramoorthy, T. (2018). “Putting Band-Aids on things that need stitches”: Immigration and the landscape of care in rural America. American Anthropologist, 120(3), 487-499. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13054

🔍 Verified References
The citations in this post have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. View the verified reference list with notes for this post.

A Body Is an Ecosystem

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work on the body and somatic knowledge, and on my life as an open-water swimmer.

“In the lake I stop being a thing with edges and become a place where water passes through.”

When I slip into the cold lake at first light, something happens that I have spent years trying to describe. The boundary I walk around with all day, the firm sense of where I stop and the world begins, loosens and goes soft. The water is the same temperature as the inside of grief. It moves into the spaces between my fingers, against my eyes, into my ears, and my breath becomes the loudest thing in the world, a tide of its own. For a few minutes I am not a person looking at a lake. I am a membrane the lake is moving through. In the lake I stop being a thing with edges and become a place where water passes through.

For most of my life I was taught to think of my body as a machine that my mind drives around, a bounded object, sealed and separate, carrying me from task to task. Geography has helped me unlearn that. There is a rich body of work in the discipline that understands the human body as something far closer to what I feel in the water: porous, ecological, continuous with its surroundings, a living system among other living systems. This post is about reading the body as an ecosystem, and about why that reading is a matter of dignity and even of human rights.

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The Body That Has No Clean Edge

The geographers who study this work under the banner of visceral geographies (the study of how the body’s gut-level, fleshy sensations shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we move through). Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2010), in the paper that helped name this field, set out its central commitments. Visceral geographies, they argue, advance our understanding of the agency of physical matter, both within and between bodies, treating the fleshy body as an actor in social and political life rather than as a passive vessel (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010). They press us to move beyond static notions of the individual body toward more interactive versions of self and other, and above all they encourage a deep skepticism of boundaries, inviting us to live in, through, and beyond the old dualisms that wall the body off from the world (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010).

That phrase, skepticism of boundaries, is the lake exactly. When I swim, the boundary between my body and the water is revealed as the convenient fiction it always was. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2010) also remind us that the visceral, despite how we talk about it, is far from presocial or simple, and that the body is far from a thing set apart from culture and meaning (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010). My gut reactions, my startle, my ease in water, were shaped by a whole history. The body is porous to its past as much as to the lake.

We Are Made of Exchange

If the body has no clean edge, then what passes across that open border becomes the very thing the body is made of. Fay, Coen, and Lawreniuk (2026), writing toward a geography of breath, make this beautifully concrete through the simplest act there is. Bodies and environments, they argue, are involved in processes of co-emergence and co-creation, so entangled that they cannot be cleanly separated, and breathing is their illustrative case (Fay et al., 2026). Each breath shows the body’s very constitution being perpetually mediated by the air and the place around it, by factors social and political as much as biological (Fay et al., 2026). The body, in their account, is a site where matter and energy converge, not a sealed container (Fay et al., 2026).

I think about this every time my breath becomes a tide in the cold water. I am taking the lake’s morning into my chest. The oxygen that becomes my thinking was, a moment ago, the world. The line between the environment and me is a revolving door rather than a wall. Fay and colleagues (2026) push this toward something they call an emancipatory respiratory politics, the insistence that everyone should be afforded the right to breathe clean air (Fay et al., 2026). I find that turn quietly radical. If the body is made of what it exchanges with its place, then a poisoned place becomes a poisoned body, and the right to a healthy environment becomes a right held in the lungs. The ecosystem of the body and the ecosystem of the world are one continuous system, and justice has to be measured across both.

Decentring the Lonely Human

There is a larger shift underneath all of this, and a Canadian geography has been quietly mapping it. Asker and Andrews (2020), reviewing posthumanist work across Canadian geography, describe its shared starting point as a scepticism of human exceptionalism, a refusal of the idea that humans stand alone, above and apart from the rest of the living world. In this work, they write, the sovereign human subject is decentred, and the agencies of a full array of human and nonhuman actors and forces are acknowledged (Asker & Andrews, 2020). They note that many geographers prefer the gentler name more-than-human geography for this same impulse, the attention to everything beyond the human that shares in making the world (Asker & Andrews, 2020). Relational ethics, they observe, sit at the centre of this tradition (Asker & Andrews, 2020).

To call a body an ecosystem is to decentre the lonely, sovereign self in just this way. I am not a single author moving through inert scenery. I am a gathering of dependencies, a crowd of other lives and processes, held together for a while and called by my name. Montefusco (2026), writing on relational food geographies, names the deepest version of this as radical interdependence, the recognition that we are constituted by our relations rather than merely connected across them, and frames the body as the scale through which we live, immersed within metabolic relations that connect society, ecologies, and place (Montefusco, 2026). Every meal, every breath, every cold swim is that radical interdependence made flesh. I am, quite literally, made of my relations.

The Dignity of Being an Ecosystem

I want to close on why this matters beyond the pleasure of a morning swim. For years I treated my body as an instrument to be driven hard and ignored, a machine that owed me performance regardless of how I used it. That belief is a quiet violence, and I have done it to myself. Reading the body as an ecosystem returns it to me as something living, interdependent, and deserving of care, a place rather than a tool. An ecosystem can be depleted, and it can be tended. It has limits that are not a personal failing and rhythms that ask to be honoured.

So I keep going down to the cold lake. I let the boundary go soft. I take the morning into my lungs and give back my warmth to the water, and I feel, for a few minutes, the plain truth that geography spent decades arriving at: that I have no clean edge, that I am made of exchange, that I am one small interdependent system inside a much larger one. The body is an ecosystem. To treat it as such, in myself and in everyone whose air and water and rest are under threat, is the beginning of a justice measured at the scale of the breath. I am not a machine. I am a living place. So are you.

References

Fay, G., Coen, S. E., & Lawreniuk, S. (2026). Of life and breath: Towards geographies of breath and breathing bodies. Geography Compass, 20(3), Article e70069. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70069

Hayes-Conroy, J., & Hayes-Conroy, A. (2010). Visceral geographies: Mattering, relating, and defying. Geography Compass, 4(9), 1273–1283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00373.x

🔍 Verified References
The citations in this post have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. View the verified reference list with notes for this post.

References: The Places I Have Loved Like People

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This page lists the verified references for The Places I Have Loved Like People, part of the A Human Geography of the Self series. All citations have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. Corrections from the original post are noted below.

Verified References

Cross, J. E. (2015). Processes of place attachment: An interactional framework. Symbolic Interaction, 38(4), 493–520. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.198

Dunkley, R. A. (2018). Monitoring ecological change in UK woodlands and rivers: An exploration of the relational geographies of citizen science. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(1), 16–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12258

Larter, P. C. L., Grek-Martin, J., & Silver, A. (2019). Does time heal all wounds? Restoring place attachment in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park after Hurricane Juan. Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 63(3), 494–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12542

Pascual-de-Sans, A. (2004). Sense of place and migration histories: Idiotopy and idiotope. Area, 36(4), 348–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00236.x

Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice-Hall.

notes

Larter et al. (2019) — journal name corrected. The original post cited the journal as “The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe canadien.” CrossRef records confirm that this journal was renamed Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes beginning with volume 63 (2019) — the same volume in which this article appears. The corrected citation reflects the current and accurate journal title.

Dunkley (2018) — publication date note. This article was first published online 25 July 2018 and appeared in the print issue vol. 44(1) in March 2019. The post’s citation of 2018 correctly reflects the online-first publication year per APA 7 convention.

All other citations in this post verified correct against CrossRef DOI records.

Verified June 29, 2026 against CrossRef DOI database.

The Places I Have Loved Like People

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Reading Time: 9 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work, and on my life as an open-water swimmer.

I have grieved shorelines the way other people grieve the departed.

There is a stretch of cold water in the Okanagan that I love the way I love certain people. I know its moods. I know the place where the lake goes suddenly deep and the temperature drops like a held breath, and the place near the reeds where the morning sun arrives first. When I have been away from it too long, I feel the absence as a physical ache, the same ache I feel for a friend I have not seen. I have stood on its shore after a hard season and felt it recognize me. I have grieved shorelines the way other people grieve the departed. For a long time, I thought this was a private eccentricity, a swimmer’s sentimentality. Then I learned that geography has a name for it, and a whole literature, and that the love I feel for water is one of the oldest subjects in the human study of place.

The name is topophilia (the affective bond between a person and a place, the love of a particular piece of the earth). I want to write about what that bond is, why it behaves so much like love for a person, and why naming it has changed how I understand my own attachments to water, to retreat, to the few places that have truly held me.

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The Love of Place

The word comes from the humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, and the geographers who use it return to his definition again and again. Larter, Grek-Martin, and Silver (2019), studying how the people of Halifax reattached to a beloved park after a hurricane tore it apart, quote Tuan’s phrase directly: topophilia is the affective bond between people and place (Larter et al., 2019). They describe how Tuan’s focus on the love of place introduced a humanistic sensibility to geography, one that treated places as centres of felt value and fields of care rather than as neutral coordinates (Larter et al., 2019). That phrase, fields of care, undid something in me when I first read it. The lake is a field of care. I tend it in my attention, and it tends me in return.

What moved me most in their study was the concept they used for the loss of such a place. They describe solastalgia (the distress a person feels when a beloved place is damaged or changed, a kind of homesickness felt without leaving home) as the grief that park users carried when the storm altered the landscape they loved (Larter et al., 2019). I have felt exactly this, watching a shoreline change, watching a low-water year expose the bones of a lake I love. Solastalgia gave a name to a grief I had carried without permission to call it grief. The geography validated the feeling.

Loved Like a Person

The heart of this post is a claim that sounds sentimental until a geographer says it plainly: the bond with a place can resemble the bond with a person, even the deepest such bond. Pascual-de-Sans (2004), writing about how people carry their attachments to place across migrations and lifetimes, openly draws the comparison. The bond between a person and their place, she suggests, can be compared to the bond between a mother and her child, specific and unique to them, even as they remain aware that countless other such bonds exist in the world (Pascual-de-Sans, 2004). The awareness of other people’s loves, she argues, deepens rather than diminishes one’s own (Pascual-de-Sans, 2004).

I have read that passage many times now. It tells me my love for the cold lake is far from a metaphor stretched too thin. It is a recognized form of human attachment, structured like the love between kin, particular and irreplaceable. When I say the lake knows me, I am describing what Pascual-de-Sans calls a relationship between a person and a place that becomes part of who that person is. The water has helped raise me. That is beyond poetry. It is geography.

Cross (2015), mapping the distinct processes through which people grow attached to places, helps me understand how such a bond is actually built. She identifies several interacting processes, among them the sensory (in which we come to know a place through the body and the five senses) and the narrative (in which we tell and retell the stories that bind us to it) (Cross, 2015). My attachment to the lake is sensory in the most literal way a bond can be. I have taken that water into my mouth and onto my skin ten thousand times. I have stories about it that I tell and retell until they have become part of my own history. Cross shows me that love of place is far from a single feeling. It is a set of practices, repeated over years, until the place is woven through the self.

Open water swimmer in a cold lake, arms outstretched, surrounded by calm blue water — Open-water swimming as sensory knowledge: the body learning a place from the inside out.

The Bonds That Endure

One of the quiet gifts of this literature is its insistence that these bonds last. Dunkley (2018), studying why people volunteer to monitor the health of woodlands and rivers, found that the early affective bonds people form with ecological and water spaces endure throughout the life course, and that staying connected to those places becomes a way of remaining oneself (Dunkley, 2018). Her participants returned to their waters and woods across decades, drawn by a love that had taken root early and refused to fade (Dunkley, 2018).

I am one of her participants in spirit. The bond I formed with water as a young person, in the years when so much else was unsafe, has lasted through every season of my life. Water was the one place that never frightened me. It still is. Dunkley’s finding (that these affective bonds endure and that we organize our lives partly around keeping them) describes the shape of my whole swimming life. I have arranged decades around staying close to water. I understand now that this was attachment doing what attachment does, holding me to the places that hold me.

Calm lake at dusk with still reflections and soft light on the water surface — Water at dusk: the kind of scene that calls a person back, decade after decade.

What the Lake Taught Me About Love

So I have stopped apologizing for loving places like people. The geography gives me permission, and more than permission, a vocabulary precise enough to honour the feeling. Topophilia is real. Solastalgia is real. The bond can be structured like kinship, built through the senses and through story, and it can last a lifetime. None of this is a swimmer’s sentimentality. It is one of the most thoroughly studied truths about how human beings live in the world.

I will go down to the cold lake again this week, the way you visit someone you love. I will feel the deep place where the temperature drops, and the warm shallows by the reeds, and I will feel the lake recognize me. I used to think I was projecting my need onto indifferent water. Now I think I was practising one of the oldest forms of belonging there is. The places I have loved like people loved me back, in the only language places speak, which is the language of holding. I have been held by that water for most of my life. To love it in return is the most natural geography in the world.

References

Cross, J. E. (2015). Processes of place attachment: An interactional framework. Symbolic Interaction, 38(4), 493-520. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.198

Pascual-de-Sans, A. (2004). Sense of place and migration histories: Idiotopy and idiotope. Area, 36(4), 348-357. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00236.x

Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice-Hall.

Academic Lens

This post translates topophilia into a Scholarly Personal Narrative account of an open-water swimmer’s love of place, grounded in peer-reviewed scholarship with one foundational anchor. Tuan (1974) originates the concept, and Larter, Grek-Martin, and Silver (2019) supply both the working definition (the affective bond between people and place) and the crucial concept of solastalgia, the grief attending a damaged beloved place, which the post uses to legitimize a previously unnamed form of loss. Pascual-de-Sans (2004) provides the post’s structural claim through her explicit comparison of the person-place bond to the parent-child bond, establishing that attachment to place is a recognized form of kinship-like attachment rather than mere sentiment. Cross (2015) supplies the mechanism, decomposing place attachment into interacting processes (notably the sensory and narrative) that explain how a bond with water is built through embodied repetition and storytelling. Dunkley (2018) anchors the claim of endurance, demonstrating that early affective bonds with ecological and water spaces persist across the life course and organize ongoing behaviour. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts a move characteristic of the series: it takes an emotional experience the writer had treated as idiosyncratic (loving a lake like a person) and reframes it, through verified geographic scholarship, as a well-theorized and widely shared dimension of human dwelling, converting private feeling into legible knowledge.

Clear Water - Transparent emerald alpine lake with pine-covered mountains — Clear Water. The transparent emerald waters of an alpine lake, pine-covered mountains rising beyond the far shore. Photo: Amy Tucker, 2026.

After the Rain - A rainbow over wooded landscape viewed through rain-specked window — After the Rain. A rainbow arcs over a wooded landscape seen through a rain-specked window. Photo: Amy Tucker, 2026.

On the Lake - Paddleboarders on a calm lake with mountain peaks and valley communities — On the Lake. Paddleboarders on a calm lake beneath cloud-streaked skies, with rocky mountain peaks and valley communities stretching beyond. Photo: Amy Tucker, 2026.

Ready to Enter - Open-water swimmer preparing to enter the lake — Ready to Enter. Open-water swimmer at the lake’s edge, preparing to enter the water. Photo: Amy Tucker, 2026.

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The citations in this post have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. View the verified reference list with notes for this post.

References: Listening to Stone

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This page lists the verified references for Listening to Stone, part of the A Human Geography of the Self series. All citations have been verified against CrossRef DOI records.

Verified References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Edensor, T. (2011). Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00421.x

Griffiths, M. (2025). Geopower, geos and the colonisation of Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 51(2), Article e70049. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70049

Raffles, H. (2012). Twenty-five years is a long time. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 526–534. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01158.x

Valtonen, A., & Pullen, A. (2021). Writing with rocks. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(2), 506–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12579

notes

All five citations in this post have been verified correct against CrossRef DOI records. Authors, publication years, journal titles, volume and issue numbers, and page numbers all match the CrossRef database entries. The two books (Bennett, 2010; and the foundational work of Jane Bennett cited throughout) are standard references confirmed via publisher records.

Verified June 29, 2026 against CrossRef DOI database.

Listening to Stone

Reading Time: 6 minutes

“The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait.”

There was a rock in Loreto that became my friend. I am aware of how that sounds. It was a low shelf of pale stone near the water where I sat each evening of my thirty days alone, and somewhere in the second week I stopped thinking of it as scenery and started thinking of it as a presence. It held the day’s heat into the dark. It had a worn place that fit my body. When I left it each night I found myself saying a quiet goodbye, and when I returned each evening something in me settled, the way it settles when you reach a person you trust. The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait. I felt, sitting on it, that it was teaching me something about waiting too.

For most of my life I would have dismissed this as a lonely woman projecting feeling onto an inert object. Then I found that geography takes the liveliness of matter seriously, stone included, and that a whole field has formed around the idea that the nonhuman world acts upon us in ways we have been trained to overlook. This post is about listening to stone, and about why that phrase names something real, demanding, and finally a matter of justice.

Table of Contents

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The Liveliness of Matter

The thinker who opened this door for many of us is the political theorist Jane Bennett, whose idea of vibrant matter (the proposal that physical matter is lively and active, with a capacity to affect the world, rather than being dead, passive stuff) reshaped how geographers regard the material world. Bennett (2010) argues that things we treat as inert, including metals and minerals, possess their own vitality and their own small powers, and that what we call agency arises from the interplay of many human and nonhuman forces rather than belonging to humans alone. Reading her, I understood that my rock was not a backdrop to my retreat. It was a participant in it.

Geographers took this conviction and tested it against the most stubbornly solid thing they could find, which is stone itself. Edensor (2011), studying the weathering and repair of a three-hundred-year-old church in Manchester, demonstrates that even building stone is mutable and continuously emergent, worked upon by water, frost, pollution, and time, so that the apparently fixed fabric of the church is forever changing through the agency of nonhuman forces (Edensor, 2011). His argument undid my assumption that solidity means stillness. The stone of that church, he shows, is an ongoing event rather than a finished fact, held in being only through constant relation and repair (Edensor, 2011). My rock, too, was an event in slow motion, not a thing.

Deep Time and the Constant Wobbling

What I felt on that warm shelf of stone, the sense of being in the presence of something vastly patient, has a name in this literature as well. Valtonen and Pullen (2021), writing about their bodily encounters with rocks across the world, describe stone as lively and agentic, holding the capacity to affect us, to stop us, to slow our hurried movements and invite us to sit and feel the ground (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). They draw on the idea that what looks like permanence is really a constant wobbling, the slow, ceaseless geological movement that surpasses human perception because it unfolds across billions of years, so that the contrast between geological time and our own busy hours becomes almost unbearable to hold (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021).

Their most startling move reaches into the body, and it carries forward something I wrote in an earlier post in this series about the body as an ecosystem. Valtonen and Pullen (2021) remind us, through the deep history of mineralization that first made bone, that the human skeleton is itself a geological achievement, so that we might think of ourselves as creatures partly made of stone, with no clean separation of flesh from earth (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). I sat on that rock in Loreto carrying a skeleton that was, in the longest view, kin to it. The geos was inside me as much as beneath me. Listening to stone, it turns out, is partly listening to myself.

What a Stone Can Do

The anthropologist Hugh Raffles offers the question that has stayed with me longest. Rather than asking what a stone is, he asks what a stone can do, and the asking changes everything. Raffles (2012) answers that a stone can endure and can change, can wound and can heal, can hold a person’s memories, and can serve, in its long silence, as a kind of teacher (Raffles, 2012). He found that swapping the nouns we pin on stones for verbs let the stones step out of their supposed deadness and into the light as active, protean things (Raffles, 2012).

This is exactly what my rock did. It endured, holding its place against the sea. It changed, warming and cooling with the day. It healed, in the plain sense that sitting on it each evening mended something in me. And it taught, without a word, the patience of a thing that measures time in epochs. Raffles gave me permission to take my own experience at face value. The rock was doing something. I was right to listen.

The Politics Underneath the Stone

I want to be careful here, because listening to stone can curdle into a gentle mysticism that ignores how the earth has been used as a weapon. Geographers have insisted on the harder edge. Griffiths (2025), writing on the colonisation of Palestine, develops the idea of the geos (the domain of the geological, the soil and rock and mineral, treated in Western thought as lifeless and therefore available for extraction). Drawing on the work of Kathryn Yusoff and others, he shows how the very category of nonlife has been used to render both land and certain human lives as inert, commodifiable, and expendable, so that geology and colonial violence have advanced together (Griffiths, 2025). Yusoff’s argument, which he builds upon, is that every account of a shared human geological age erases the Black and Indigenous death that extraction has always required (Griffiths, 2025).

This stops me, and it should. To treat stone as dead is not a metaphysical error alone. It has been a license for dispossession, the same logic that treats land as empty and peoples as obstacles. And I have to add a note of humility that my own position demands. The recognition that stone and land are alive and relational, which Western theory now presents as a discovery, is knowledge that Indigenous peoples have carried for millennia. As a settler scholar sitting on a rock by the Sea of Cortez, I am arriving late to something others have always known, and the honest posture is to listen rather than to claim. Listening to stone, done well, includes listening to who was already listening.

What the Rock Taught Me

So I have stopped apologizing for my friendship with a shelf of pale stone in Loreto. The geography gives me language for it, and more than language, a responsibility. Matter is lively. Stone acts, endures, and teaches. The earth is not the dead backdrop I was raised to see, and the habit of calling it dead has done real harm to land and to people alike. To listen to stone is to practise an attention that refuses the lie of inertness, the lie that anything, earthly or human, is mere material to be used and discarded.

On my last evening I sat on the rock for a long time and said goodbye properly. I pressed my hand to the worn place that fit my body and felt the day’s heat moving back out of the stone and into me, an exchange between two slow and patient things. The rock had waited ten thousand years and would wait ten thousand more, indifferent to my small visit and somehow generous within it. It taught me that I am not separate from the world, that my bones are its cousins, and that the practice of listening, to stone, to land, to one another, is the beginning of treating the living world as the living thing it has always been. I came home from the desert knowing how to wait a little better. A rock taught me that. I am still grateful.

References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Griffiths, M. (2025). Geopower, geos and the colonisation of Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 51(2), Article e70049. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70049

Raffles, H. (2012). Twenty-five years is a long time. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 526–534. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01158.x

Valtonen, A., & Pullen, A. (2021). Writing with rocks. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(2), 506–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12579

🔍 Verified References
The citations in this post have been verified against CrossRef DOI records. View the verified reference list with notes for this post.