Too often in formal academic work, we spend our time waiting. Waiting to be sure, waiting for all the evidence to come in (even though we know it is never 'complete'), waiting for reviews, waiting for publication timelines. Meanwhile, life and the world around us keeps moving, also waiting – for us, our words, and the stories we have to tell. There is often good reason to wait. But there is also something to be said to start laying the bread crumbs along the way, offering thoughts that are emergent, forming, becoming even as we write them more differently later, when we are more sure, more complete, more analytically confident, more peer reviewed.
This piece is a trail of breadcrumbs, a peek into the emerging analytical framework within a multi-year research process. It is a snapshot of where we are now, two cycles of seasons and field work in. Formally, these are emerging narratives, or arguments, that are slowly forming in our minds from the stories we are unearthing across our neighbourhoods, cities, and countries. They are the first of our patterns. The weave they weave may change as we go forward, but what they are now is also a story worth marking and noting.
What are the emerging narratives from a project that tries to look at the way people who live in vulnerable settlements understand climate change's impacts on their health? Here is what we know so far from across our sites, even as we know they take shape and hold meaning differently in each one.
Watch this space as we write more along these emerging lines of argument, thickening our archives, deepening our evidence, picking up more bread crumbs and strengthening our weaves. We will see what can travel, and what must stay more rooted. We will look in different directions at points – to the past to see where things came from, to notions of futures. We'll let some stories remain unmediated so people's own words remain enough. We'll interpellate and analyse others so there is a chorus that no single voice alone can carry. The other stories in this section have begun this work, and each will have a lot or a little of each of these bread crumbs – so readers can weave right along with us.
