different academic voice

Patti Lather (2006) suggest that work like Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (1999) counter-story to "Western ideas about the benefits of the pursuit of knowledge" disrupts "the rules of the research game." Efforts such as these, she claims, "provide a different kind of academic voice" (p. 44).

Through both content and representation, my goal has been to (re)produce a 'text' that does what it theorizes. This includes challenging binaries,  anthropocentrism, and ways in which what has come to count as legitimate knowledge in the Academy often closes down the possibility of embodied connections between human and non-human Others.

Yet in a culture that regularly assumes only humans have consciousness (Plumwood, 2002), even though there are numerous accounts to suggest otherwise (e.g. Bekoff, Allen & Burghardt, 2002; Buhner, 2004, 2006; Redden, 2005; Sheldrake, 1999; Tompkins & Bird, 1973), I am left wondering whether this different kind of academic voice can resist complicity in exclusion of animate Earth from research conversations. Can it not only acknowledge, but actively invite contributions of more than-human persons (see Harvey, 2006a, 2006b)?

To invite these contributions, I provide many spaces in this hypertext, offering openings where they may join. In other words, I am writing my way into a way of producing polyvocal hypertext where all the actors are not human (Haraway, 2004a; see also, Abram, 1996, 2006; Berry, 1999, Berry & Tucker, 2006; Bringhurst, 2002; Harvey, 2006a; Harvey, 2006a; Jensen, 2004; Lipsett, 2002; Sheldrake, 2003, etc. etc. etc.).