Composting Layers of Christchurch History

Bibliographic Data

ID13081567
AuthorsRebecca Ream (0000-0002-3165-8556, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume5
Issue3
Pages74-74
Publication date2021-08-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGenealogy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2313-5778 • E-ISSN: 2313-5778
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/genealogy5030074
OpenAlexW3193313921
LanguageEN
References cited13

This is a poetic compost story. It is a situated tale of how I gradually began to shred my fantasy of being a self-contained responsible individual so I could become a more fruitful response-able Pākehā (for the purposes of this paper, a descendant of colonial settlers or colonial settler) from Christchurch (the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand), Aotearoa (The Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) name for New Zealand) New Zealand. Poetic compost storying is a way for me to turn over Donna Haraway’s composting ethico-onto-epistemology with critical family history and critical autoethnography methodologies. To this end, I, in this piece, trace how I foolishly believed that I could separate myself from my colonial family and history only to find that I was reinscribing Western fantasies of transcendence. I learnt by composting, rather than trying to escape my past, that I could become a more response-able Pākehā and family member

Aotearoa · Archaeology · Art · Autoethnography · Colonialism · Descendant · Fantasy · Genealogy · Indigenous · Literature · Poetry · Situated · Sociology · Adult and Continuing Education Topics · Critical and Liberation Pedagogy · Gender Studies · History · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Ecology