Drawing as research: drawing emplaced animals

Smith, Harriet ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3775-4730 2026. Drawing as research: drawing emplaced animals. cultural geographies 10.1177/14744740261418697

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Abstract

There is contemporary interest in drawing practice as a research method in geography. This paper gathers aligned insights from visual studies and geography to deconstruct humanistic processes involved in researcher seeing and representation. Seeing is critiqued as a socio-cultural practice that can affirm intersectional injustices and suffering. I argue that to resist humanist interpretations of the more-than-human world, it is necessary to both de-territorialise the researcher self, and the research practice. I demonstrate that drawing performed as a becoming practice, offers one way to move towards a de-territorialisation approach and to conduct field research with a posthuman sensibility. The research is an example of a feminist research assemblage involving processual toggling between theory, practice and reflexive analysis. The discussion illuminates the problems of researching emplaced animals elucidated through two case studies that describe drawing a zoo tiger and a city farm cow. The drawing vignettes are introduced as experiments in the capacity for geographical research to attend to subjects through loosening the humanistic regimes of seeing and representation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	1474-4740
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	31 March 2026
Last Modified:	31 Mar 2026 15:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186121

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