Cultivating a politics of competent participation in places always already multiple

This paper reflects on beginning stages of collaborative work with Larrakia elders as together we walk, talk, see, write, hear, sing Gurambai/Rapid Creek. My tasks and roles here are very different to theirs and as we move along the creek together, and amidst quite different configurations of people, seasons, stories, actions. But there is a hope that working together at and with the creek is possible; and that something, we don’t yet know what, will come out of it. It seems odd to make this the subject of a talk in an academic panel, and at the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam. And yet, it is this bumbling and grappling and missing and connecting which is exactly what I wonder might travel. If it is THIS that is ‘doing creek work’, that voices places, then how might I account such activities? Telling stories of this work together I experiment with articulating such efforts as a nascent (cosmo)politics and ask under what conditions, and via what kinds of specifications, might such a politics be cultivated. Then beyond this, also explore the kind of STS knowledge work that this implies.