Intimate sensing in climate research
Creators: name: Williams, Catherine
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 450110
subject: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander media, film, animation and photography
classificationCode: 470107
subject: Media studies

description: Scientific ways of knowing climate change are valuable, but technically abstract and impersonal. While analytical and computational modelling practices provide crucial information, their presence in dominant narratives of climate research and policy has led to a deleterious absence: they have overridden the methodological validity of lived experience and the embodied recognition of changes taking place in everyday life.  

Intimate Sensing in Climate Research is a practice-based dissertation which focuses on the body as a site of climate perception and attempts to introduce certain emplaced climate sensing experiences into the climate discourse, through the field work of a documentary media practice. Collaborating with Bama colleague, Jarramali Kulka (a Kuku Yalanji-Nyungkal man on his country in tropical Far North Queensland), and training with him on-country into various situated performative registers, this work draws initially from the term intimate sensing  and grows it through a performative practice-based methodology devised with Jarramali to complicate the authority of remote sensing.

The work leads with intimate sensing - as a generative counter position to remote sensing - and weaves together knowledge practices from Yalanji know-how, climate science, traditional ecological knowledge, documentary production and digital social sciences to develop sensory media techniques that phenomenologically evidence and perform intimate everyday encounters with climate. In the process, the project renovates existing and fictious euro-centric notions of terra nullius in climate sensing with a comprehensible imaginary that enacts into academic discourse 'a world that already has its own stories'. 

Using film practice as a means of active learning, the research narrative is communicated via a series of relational and performative texts, stills and audio-visual actualities, their sensations and affects communicating degrees of intimate knowledge to the audience's body. In working with sensory textures, embodied indexicality and counter-memory, the research identifies encounters of timeliness, destabilisation and immersion as valuable in future performative climate documentary work.

Focusing on intimate registers, this communications project opens its audiences to the imaginative possibilities of three significant intimate sensing actions in climate research. First, it focuses on body as a frame in which sensory experiences of climate can be made evident. Second, it argues for an emplaced perception of climate sensitivity, this being a phenomenon of durational climate experienced as an individual body as well as with-and-through assembled sensory landscapes and neighbourhoods. Third, it brings forth climate memory, a commemorative action of counter-memory that gestures to what is primordially within as well as beyond human-centric social worlds, where oppressed knowledge, that in spite of everything has not been socially forgotten.  Field materials are housed at: http://intimate-sensing.teacup.net.au  (password: cittphd)