Dr Laura Pottinger
Environmental Humanities Research Fellow, February - April, 2027
Laura Pottinger is a Research Fellow in social and cultural geography at the University of Manchester, where she currently holds a Simon Early Career Research Fellowship. Her research is interested in everyday forms of social and environmental activism, people and plant relationships, and practices of craft and cultivation. Her work has been published in the journals Area, Geoforum, Geo: Geography and Environment, cultural geographies, and International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and she is an editorial board member of the Journal of Creative Research Methods. Her current project Making Slow Colour works closely with artists, community organisations and materials scientists to examine the practice of natural textile dyeing, and the relationship between slow, creative practice and environmental care. Carried out on a part-time basis over six years, and drawing on ethnographic and creative methodologies, this project also explores the potentials and challenges of alternative temporalities in academic scholarship. Laura was also Co-Investigator on MossWorlds (2024-2025), an interdisciplinary project examining the historical and contemporary significance of Manchester’s mosses, and Methods for Change (2020-2023) which explores the transformative potential of research methods in the social sciences and humanities.
Project title: The unfinished quilt: stitching and slow-making intimate people-plant relationships for the environmental humanities
Interest in people-plant relationships is currently flourishing in geography, with scholars suggesting attention to the vegetal is long-overdue in multi-species research. Questions of temporality, agency and care are key; plants’ slow, cyclical growth and response patterns demand nuanced bodily attunements and forms of attentiveness from researchers. This project asks how hands-on, creative and collaborative making methods might facilitate plant understandings. Its focus is a patchwork quilt. Currently under construction, the unfinished quilt is formed from fabrics dyed with plants that I have collected over the last five years. Natural dyeing is currently experiencing revived attention, highlighting contemporary public interest in environmentally sustainable crafts and desires for intimate understandings of plants and materials. As I attempt to complete the quilt, while reflecting on and writing about this process, I am interested in understanding how research could be reimagined to accommodate both the cyclical, extended temporalities of plants, and the constraints of institutional funding timeframes and precarious career paths. Via a series of tactile, practical dyeing and stitching workshops and discussions, the project asks how hands-on, creative and collaborative making methods might facilitate planty understandings, and it explores the potentials and challenges for slowly paced Environmental Humanities research.