Forest as a specific place for girls and their green criticism

ABSTRACT

This paper explores what a forest as a specific place means and does for girls, while it scrutinises how to understand place and how to consider place methodologically. The girls, called ‘forest daughters’ here, write letters to the female President of Finland. The letters portray a forest as a lived ‘place-world’ that ties place and self together. The multiplicity of these relations is methodologically displayed as an assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’ and conjoined a perspective of the ‘where of research’. The paper argues that place and self help construct and activate each other. A forest is a site of pleasures and possibilities and in the letters, it turns out that a forest becomes a stage and practice of power that develops environmental activism and gives rise to utterances of green criticism. To develop and exemplify this discussion, I examine a letter to the president written by one of these young forest daughters.

KEYWORDS:

• girls
• place
• forest
• letters
• writing
• assemblage

Introduction

Place is an especially productive and enabling concept (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, 1). The notion that places are ‘deeply woven into the fabric of who we are’ (Preston 2003, xvi) has widened the study of place from one that was seen to be ‘highly abstract and remote from experience’ (Tuan 1975, 151; Anderson, Adey, and Bevan 2010, 591) towards an approach that considers place as ‘thoroughly enmeshed’ into the human condition (Casey 2001, 684). In this paper, I draw on the perspective of place and self, and conjoin that with the ‘where of research’. In doing so, this paper responds to recent calls for a greater understanding of place and methodological consideration of place (Anderson and Jones 2009; Anderson, Adey, and Bevan 2010; Booth 2015; Tuck and McKenzie 2015).

Anderson, Adey, and Bevan (2010) note that too often methodological approaches have envisioned place as a simple backdrop providing the means to exercise methodological praxis, rather than explicitly seeking to understand the difference place makes to the research encounter (590). They consider place to have two key dimensions, geographical and social. Anderson, Adey, and Bevan (2010) are calling for methodologies to include the explicit consideration of the geographical dimension of place. According to them, the geographical positioning of place may refer to a combination of site as location or locale, whilst place’s social dimension refers to the way in which we as individuals are placed in relation to social practices and opportunities (Cresswell 1996; Anderson, Adey, and Bevan 2010, 591). They argue that the social dimensions of place are increasingly taken seriously as significant aspects influencing the research encounter, whereas the geographical dimensions of place often continue to be overlooked (590).

Anderson, Adey, and Bevan (2010) introduce their research model and call it the ‘polylogue’, including not simply the researcher and the researched, but also place (598). They assume that this way researchers could consider their method ‘as if place matters’ (590). Their idea is that ‘place can be acknowledged and harnessed within the methodological action to contextualise, ground, and inscribe the knowledge that is produced with a geographical and social signature’ (599).

Anderson and Jones (2009) affirm that the idea according to which place makes a difference to the research encounter is not such a remarkable one for a geographer though when it comes to research approaches, geographers have largely failed to take seriously enough of the difference that place makes to methodology. Anderson and Jones’s interest is in the role that place plays in interviewing young people and influencing the knowledge produced during the research encounter (292). They sum up their methodological interest – the ‘where of research’ – as exploring the role, relations and influence of place on human (and nonhuman or even post-human) life, while three emplaced interview methods are utilised in order to ‘get at’ everyday lived experiences of young people (294). In relation to children’s geographies, besides Anderson and Jones (2009) in particular Philo (2003) and Jones (2003) have emphasised the role that place makes in the relationship with self and place. These works presuppose that the human condition is profoundly a placial one (see Casey 2013).

Place is a contested yet recurrent and important theme in social sciences (Booth 2015, 20). Tuck and McKenzie (2015) suggest that it is the specificity and the rootedness of place that makes it so important in social sciences (637). Within qualitative research, place is an emerging theme and alternative ways of engaging place more meaningfully have made encouraging moves (Booth 2015; Tuck and McKenzie 2015). While Anderson, Adey, and Bevan (2010) emphasise the rather fixed physical, social and cultural dimensions of place, many other researchers – particularly those considering people’s experience in relation to specific places – have identified more intangible constituting elements of place. Place is now considered to be far more complex than the physical, the social and the cultural, and it is increasingly being acknowledged as elusive, ethereal, and perhaps at times, chaotic and confusing (Booth 2015, 21; Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 633). Therefore, how place is understood in research has significant bearing upon the difference that place makes to methodology. In her intriguing paper, Booth (2015) suggests that a conceptualisation of place as dynamic, open and more-than-human offers methodological possibilities regarding the representation of the self in relation to place (20). As Booth (2008) puts it, when ‘we experience a place we experience an intertwining of ourselves with that place; an intertwining of memories, both personal and collective, with the physicality of place’ (299).

Massey (1993) characterises place as the shifting manifestation of internal relations, as process. She configures place as unbounded, as having ‘full of internal differences’ (67). The uniqueness of each place represents a ‘throwntogetherness’, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now – itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres – and a negotiation, which must take place within and between both human and more-than-human (Massey 2005, 140; Booth 2015, 23).

In this paper, I am asking what a forest as a specific place means and does for the girls and, further, how to understand the place and what kind of methodological considerations these understandings may involve. The paper follows the idea of place as dynamic, open and more-than-human (Massey 2005; Booth 2015) and will encourage to a rethinking of people’s experiences in relation to specific places. I begin by introducing the ‘letters’ and their writers, the ‘girls’ of the data. After this, I theorise with place in terms of the ‘where of a letter’. In order to capture a ‘throwntogetherness’ at play, I discuss the methodological means of an assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’. Finally, I examine a letter to the president written by one girl, reflect the letter in relation to specific places; experiences, imaginings and emotions, along with the assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’.

The terms place and space are often used side by side, where differences in meaning are largely ignored. In this paper, in order to be sensitive to the differences, the term place is preferred to space. In general, the experiential features of place, its subjective and lived aspects have been emphasised (Casey 2001, 683). According to the widely cited notion, ‘geographical spaces become places when human beings imbue them with meaning’ (Kaltenborn 1997, 176). Places are ‘drenched in cultural meaning’, whilst spaces are considered to be empty abstractions (Preston 2003, 74; Anderson and Jones 2009, 293). Moreover, Casey (2001) characterises ‘the geographical self’ as being oriented and situated in place, where place is ‘to be the immediate environment of my lived body – an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural’ (683).

Girls and letters

The girls are the writing sort here and they write letters. The data consist thousands of letters that girls have written to the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen (in office 2000–2012) during a 12-year period. The letters are archived as the ‘letters of citizens’ sent by children and thus entitled ‘children’s letters’ in the Office of the President of the Republic of Finland. I had access to the data as I made a request for reading the letters, and I got official permission from the President. In most cases, when I refer to letter writers as ‘forest daughters’, this means young female letter writers aged from 9 to 12 years. The extracts of the data will be appended with details of the writer’s age if I have that information.

For the most part, the letter writers are native-born Finns and the forest daughters introduced in the paper inhabit rural, remote country locations in Finland. A salient observation about the letter data is the division of the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, i.e. the environments where the letters are composed. This creates a background where the girls interpret matters, their daily life and construct their social, political and cultural standpoints in the letters. Place matters, as I argue in the paper.

The letters are sites for girls’ activism and the utterances of daughter-citizens (Salo 2006). Nature places, animals and forests seem to call forth activist emphases and give rise to vigorous green criticism. While girls are often marginalised in the traditional arenas of activism, their defence of nature, animals and forests is taken to be the very place of their activism. The condition of the waters, climate and rainforests is well known. As the writers are Internet literate, they are so well informed that they can even give good advice to the president. In case the president might need any further details, she is asked to call the enclosed phone number.

The letter writing is motivated by the notion that the president as a distinctive political person has far more power than anyone else ‘they know’ and, because she is a woman, it is worth trying to make a difference. Actually, this becomes explicit in many letters. The president is a meaningful and powerful person for the girls in many ways. Tarja Halonen was the first female president of Finland and particularly at the beginning of her first term in office (2000–2006), there was a distinctive gender dynamic: ‘A female president is a big deal!’ (nine-year-old girl); ‘Women must have been oppressed quite a bit in Finland since there have been so many male presidents before you! (Girl, age not mentioned). Undoubtedly, the girls are sensitive to gender. In the letters, the president and the girls seem to share a great number of things: girlhood, womanhood and many interests in politics seem to be shared (Salo 2010, 2013).

Criticism of adult society, even the president, is expressed in the letters. The girls demand that the president would really ‘do something’ and, along with the appeal, they intensify the message with many exclamation marks. Now and again, the letter writers seem to become frustrated, as things do not develop as they wish: ‘But we’re just children and it’s not like anyone bothers to ask for our opinion. Even this is probably just useless complaining. We would like that you, as a president, would have an opinion about it and share it with us!?! (…)’ (Two girls, ages not mentioned).

Place: the ‘where of a letter’

Place involves relationships with things, beings and happenings (Booth 2015, 21). Massey emphasises that the uniqueness of each place represents a ‘throwntogetherness’, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres) and it is worth noting that a negotiation must take place within and between both human and more-than-human (Massey 2005, 140). For Massey (1997), place is process – unbounded, internally related and more-than-human.

Place has become one of the key means by which to tell new stories about the world (Massey and Thrift 2009, 276−277). The forest daughters’ letters can be viewed as storied relationships with places, the particularities of specific place. In these letters, girls describe how place is experienced, lived and practiced in turn (see Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 635). The descriptions become intertwined with the politics of place as it is the very grounds for writing a letter to a politician.

The letters are written ‘in place’ and ‘of place’ (Casey 2001) giving insight into the lived realities of the experiences of writers’ specific places. The letters cannot be considered as simple illustrations or mere words; therefore, this paper, following the idea of the ‘where of research’, considers them as places where the letters occur in relation to various experiences, imaginings, emotions and dreams. Place is regarded as a departure point from which manifestations of self are built and rebuilt (see Leyshon and Bull 2011, 162). The letters are in situ descriptions and representations of places that matter and thus considered the ‘where of letters’. The letters are extraordinary artefacts of their kind as the girls are writing voluntarily about the places that matter to them.

In this paper, the notion that ‘place and self help construct and activate each other’ (Sack 1997, 132; Casey 2001, 684) becomes a crucial point. Sack states that ‘places need the actions of selves to exist and have effect’ as the opposite is equally true, ‘selves cannot be formed and sustained or have effect without place’ (Sack 1997, 88; Casey 2001, 691). The letter writers situate and orient themselves in places, nature places and above all, forest places. In the letters, a forest enters actively into the constitution of girls and shape their ways of being in the world. The opposite might be equally true, as forests need the actions of forest daughters and their environmental activism to exist.

In the Finnish context, forests in particular are mysterious, enchanting places, which the writers of my data feel demand both care and protection. The whole array of topics that the forest daughters pose as issues in their letters can be viewed within the frameworks of a politics of place, green ethics, green criticism and young writers’ modern environmental awareness (Salo 2013). Nature is respected, not only on the level of speech, but also on the level of action: ‘We are concerned over a very important matter: Finland’s nature. We’ve been at a river for a week. And every time it has been littered even though we have cleaned it every day. One day we fished out a spring mattress from the river.’ (Two girls, ages not mentioned). The writers manifest their activity not only by writing letters, but also by being active, which, under such circumstances, requires effort in the care of places that are important to them.

A degree of freedom given to Finnish children is noteworthy here. They are allowed to go to school alone, choose their routes and footpaths, to cross forests, parks and fields. Children in Finland are not controlled as much as children in many other Western societies and so they have a certain degree of autonomy. Forests, parks and fields are public places, free to wander around in, to play or gather and there are no restrictions.

A forest is a place that is respected, practiced and enacted in girls’ daily lives. A forest is a stage and practice of power and it is the site of great pleasures and possibilities. Accordingly, we do not just experience something but we experience things ‘in place’ (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, 1; Cresswell 2013, 38). Experience is hence at the heart of what place means and does, and most often, it is something that is practiced in girls’ own localities.

One girl writes about things that she has experienced in a specific place in her locality. She is concerned about birds and she demands: ‘Don’t do this!’ with an illustration, where she has drawn trees that had been cut down and she insists that birds should have trees for building their nests and nurturing their fledglings. She continues: ‘Dear president. The forests are in peril. Can the felling of trees be reduced? I hope you’ll take this up in the parliament’ (eight-year-old girl). Recurrently, the forest daughters suggest that people should take care of forests, as this, as they write, is how forests serve citizens as a place for retreat and bring benefits such as picking berries or listening to the birds singing. Culturally and socially a forest can be viewed as a kind of ‘pure place’ (Jones 2000, 32−35), where diverse imaginations become manifest. In a sense, nature has a special value for the forest daughters and it is a symbolic and concrete place in unison – to cite Barad (2007), ‘reality is composed of things-in-phenomena’ (140).

Assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’

Place can be conceptualised through the relations that it holds, and that holds it, within the world. Place becomes constituted between the relations with things, beings and happenings (Booth 2015, 23). In order to capture the multiplicity – a girl who writes, her letter and the place she lives with – I will make use of by methodological means in terms of an assemblage ‘girl–place–letter’.

Deleuze and Guattari (2011) conceptualise assemblages as a theoretical and methodological means of recasting and considering things anew. Above all, assemblages encourage a rethinking of methodologies in order to discover a different view of the world. At their best, social science methodologies not only describe the worlds they observe but are involved in the invention or creation of the worlds (Law and Urry 2004; Barad 2007; Coleman and Ringrose 2014), that is, they are creating the worlds.

The point is that assemblage can be understood as a temporary grouping of relations (Coleman and Ringrose 2014). The emphasis here is not so much on ‘the terms or elements’ that ‘make up’ the assemblage, but rather on the relations, the ‘in-between’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002; Coleman and Ringrose 2014, 9). This between-ness underlines an approach to relations as they emerge rather than judging them a priori (11). On the other hand, this involves that, as a researcher attends to the ‘in-between’ (15), things are always in process, changing and transforming (Deleuze and Guattari 2011, 116; Coleman and Ringrose 2014, 9, 15).

With respect to childhood studies, Lee (2001) was one of the first to use Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) concept of assemblage. In 2005, Prout (2005) advocated the notion of assemblages including both human and more-than-human entities in his assemblage of ‘child–animal–popular culture’. Informed by the Deleuzian assemblages, Lee (2001) suggests: ‘Whether children are in or out of place, or whether new places are being made for them, we can ask what assemblages they are involved in and what extensions they are living through’ (116). Prout (2005) emphasises that various things can be put into fresh perspective when they are viewed as assemblages (116).

In this paper, the assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’ is the methodological means for recasting and considering how place and self construct and activate each other in the letters (Sack 1997, 132; Casey 2001, 684). As expressed, self and place become enmeshed (Casey 2001), entangled (Barad 2007) and intertwined (Booth 2015) in the letters. Next, a letter written by one forest girl is deployed to exemplify and develop my claims about place and self.

Dear President, this is how I am

Children tend to placialise (Casey 2013) and materialise their environments (Holloway and Valentine 2000a; Salo 2014) as their identities are constituted in and through particular places and spaces (Holloway and Valentine 2000b, 765). The girls introduce themselves at the beginning of their letters while contextualising themselves in specific places, depicting these carefully, entering into them and inhabiting them. As we know, there is no self without place, and no place without self (Casey 2001). In terms of the ‘where of a letter’, the girls map themselves to the very places that are important to them and depict these places to a person who does not know them yet. Along with this assemblage, there often arises a problem:

I am an 11-year-old girl who has a problem. My problem is that houses will destroy forests! I love nature and am afraid that it will be completely eliminated from the world! Think that plants and trees produce oxygen and without it we will not survive. (An 11-year-old girl)

The problem is presented vigorously with exclamation marks. In order to be convincing, the writer informs the president of the troublesome state of affairs. The writer asserts her affection for nature and fears the ongoing changes. She believes in conserving forests, as they are good stewards of the earth and a part of intra-action of the world.

The writer illustrates her notepaper with a picture of her specific place, where three, one yellow and two red coloured, traditional one-family houses are drawn in the middle of the white sheet of paper. The sun is shining, birds are flying around in the cloudless sky, the Finnish flag is swaying in the wind and diverse little paths criss-cross like rhizomes around the houses. Life is wrapped up in cloudless happiness, harmony and tranquillity. Bright colours, singing birds and a soft breeze are folded into the coherent whole of this particular place in the world. However, things change and it conveys a problem to the letter writer.

In our village, there is an ice hockey rink, where all the villagers used to go skating in winter and playing in summer. There nearby was BEFORE a forest where young people met and children built their huts. I also had a hut there but not anymore. The forest was piled with the huts where we played and these were fine, so fine they were that even the youth didn’t violate them! NOW there are only brushwood and silence. The houses will take the place of forests. I do know that people need houses but this village will soon be drowning in houses! Row houses have been built and now even a block of flats! A block of flats does not fit in our village! (An 11-year-old girl, original capitals)

The writer describes her sense of belonging to this specific place, and how this generates a connection with people who live and share social practices in this place as a kind of meeting place in a constellation of relations (Massey 1993). A sense of belonging involves the intensity of meaning and this understanding hinges on the idea that the relationship between self and place is dependent upon the accumulation of experiences, including social interactions, both with and within places (Travlou 2007; Valentine and Skelton 2007; Leyshon and Bull 2011, 161).

Interestingly enough, the specific place described here represents the ‘throwntogetherness’ where the here-and-now becomes negotiated with thens and theres and, as described, a negotiation takes place within and between both human and nonhuman (Massey 2005, 140). The writer responds as to how to meet up with the particular trees, villagers, huts, houses and more. As Booth (2015) argues, place authenticity is reconfigured as a complex, dynamic and ongoing negotiation of things, beings and events (23)

Building huts can be seen as children’s construction of their own specific places. Often the huts are secret places made for children as a place to belong. In the Nordic countries, building huts is a kind of common cultural practice, while the huts are a particular place for constructions of selves and peer relations among children (Kjørholt 2003). The hut walls operate at the same time both as territorial, social as well as cultural borders between particular places and the surrounding social and cultural landscape. Moreover, the huts manifest closeness to nature, especially forests, places for ecstatic experiences and more (265). It is not difficult to trace the many meanings huts have for the letter writer above and the fact that societal activity arises from one’s own experiences.

The forest daughters inhabit a non-urban environment, rural, remote country locations and they live a kind of country girlhood. The rural locations often become presented as a kind of rural idyll and an essential part of national identity (Holloway and Valentine 2000a, 15). Anderson and Jones (2009; see Howorth 1999) pay attention to how place enters actively into the constitution of persons. As they argue, this is a process particularly explicit in rural areas because of people’s closer relationship to nature and this shapes their ways of being in the world (294). The letter extract unfolds many themes around the specific places of the letter writer and, as described, the forest becomes a social, geographical and symbolic construct, the very place where you can live, experience and create your own dimension.

The letter writer creates her own idyll or even utopia, literally meaning ‘place that does not exist’ or ‘a happy place’ (Lahtinen and Lehtimäki 2011). At the same time, this idyllic, pure place serves interestingly as a way of denying change. There are worries and fears when one’s environment is changed and spoiled, that is to say, spoiled by culture in all its manifestations, the balance is shaken up and harmony is lost. Place becomes an active, material production of power and social relationships (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, 2).

Mystic relationship with nature and becoming-animal

Greenhough (2004) refers by the term ‘language of the world’, a focus on experiences, practices and feelings that are before and beyond conventional representations (Anderson and Jones 2009, 294). Then again, Barad (2007) argues that we are part of the world in its differential becoming, although we assume an inherent difference between human and more-than-human, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse (185). In the writing process, besides mapping themselves in the particular places, the letter writers and the letters are ontologically becoming in their temporal emergence (Salo 2014). Undoubtedly, practices of knowing and being are not isolable as they are mutually implicated. ‘We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world’ (Barad 2007, 185 original italics). The forest daughters are writing themselves into being, in specific places, and this becomes assembled in the specific letters.

Behind our house, there is a small field, where I go every day. I follow a path that soon will be hidden under the houses, I suppose. I go to the field to watch small creepy-crawlies. It is such a pleasure to go there. I don’t cause any harm to them, otherwise they would harm me. The creepy-crawlies and flies will never irritate me. When I grow up I will be an environmentalist and a photographer and I will take photos of this field and the other things of nature’s own. Still, there is a stone that the state has brought there and it is the second best and important thing to me. I go up to that stone every day, too, whether it’s raining or shining. (An 11-year-old girl)

The letter extract puts into words a secret relationship between the world and the writer. The relationship is folded into the specifically configured material and symbolic actuality of the place: the field, pleasure, the path, concerns, the creepy-crawlies, the stone and all the things of nature’s own. In a way, the letter testifies to the quality of a mode of being, as this forms part of the epistolary practice, as Foucault (1997) demonstrates. The letter leaves a trace of how the writer becomes dazzled with the world of nature, how she makes sense of herself and the world around her, how she writes about her inner impulses and how these become a weapon in her mystic relationship with nature (Foucault 1997; Tamboukou 2010, 159). This is the kind of specific place, where mystic wilderness, an immediate experience of the unity of herself and nature, is celebrated. Forests are important, for the sacredness of nature can be felt in those places (Pietarinen 1987, 323−331). Following Massey (1993), place as an unbounded more-than-human phenomenon is not a fixed thing that centres upon the autonomous human self (67). In a sense, the relationship with place and self becomes consubstantial so that ‘the distinct existence and form of both partake of, or become united in a common substance’ (Gray 1998, 345; Anderson and Jones 2009, 294).

A kind of mysticism or personhood can also be felt in natural entities like the sun, wind, trees, landscapes and the earth as a whole, as well as animals in the sense that people perceive them as showing a ‘responsive relatedness’. Milton (2002) proposes that many environmental activists express this sense of personhood when they talk about the natural areas that they seek to protect (29). In terms of intra-action, we can ruminate on what people and those entities do together. This may help the researcher to focus on such intra-actions instead of interactions between humans (Änggård 2016, 87). An important intervention includes blurring the boundaries between the human and more-than-human worlds (Taylor, Pacinini-Ketchabaw, and Blaise 2012, 82) and recasting humans and human agency within heterogeneous assemblages alongside other entities (Deleuze and Guattari 2011).

Nature offers a kind of retreat, and the importance of the retreat – going to the field and a place – in helping to put one in contact with oneself (Foucault 1988, 28–30). Following Foucault, then, the stoneplace as a haven or a retreat becomes for the letter writer a spiritual retreat into herself; every day a precise act where she retires into and examines herself. Apparently, the writer’s eagerness to share the creepy-crawlies’ world is an expression of entering a different placial (Casey 2013) and temporal rhythm, while the writer is testing how she understands herself in relation to the world. It is her place-world, her specific mode of being in the world.

In Deleuzian terms, it would mean entering a reality of becoming-animal, as Deleuze and Guattari (2011) note: ‘there is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one does not in reality become animal’ (302). Tamboukou (2010) describes intriguingly what becoming-animal can mean while theorising the letters of Gwen John, an artist. John lived ‘like a savage girl in the forest’, a becoming-cat, when looking for her lost cat on the outskirts of Paris (156–164). Here the reality or place described is not a fixed thing that determines or centres upon the autonomous human self (see Booth 2015, 24).

At times, researchers have been criticised for not using a common vocabulary when referring to natural environments. When adult researchers have studied children’s conceptualisations of nature places, they have assumed that their own concepts of nature are shared with children, who participate in their explorations (Collado, Íñiguez-Rueda, and Corraliza 2016, 716–718). I agree with the idea that people’s conceptualisations of the natural worlds might not be universal, but I think that to use a common vocabulary, if even possible, is not needed.

In this context, I have to raise a methodological notion of transgressive data. St. Pierre (1997) discusses a research process, when a researcher has difficulties separating herself from the participants. She found that she was able to place herself within the research assemblage and her ‘own’ subjectivity was folded into the subjectivities of the participants in her study (178 italics original). St. Pierre describes how she started to ruminate on the status of data and how certain kinds of data ‘were uncodable, excessive, out-of-control, and out-of-category’ (179). She argues that paying attention to such transgressive data is an ethical project, which is concerned with responsibility, with ‘theorising our own lives, examining the frames with which we read the world, and moving toward an ongoing validity of response’ (186). Ethics is created within the research process and it is about sense-making (186). The demand for a common vocabulary when researching natural worlds, I think, is a way to pass over the idea of sense-making.

In addition, researchers are entangled within the assemblages they seek to study (Coleman and Ringrose 2014, 6). In my research process, I have confronted the same kind of assemblage that St. Pierre discusses. Particularly, this specific letter of a forest daughter cited in this context, started to glow (MacLure 2014, 173) and my ‘own’ subjectivity had become entangled with the subjectivity of the girl, the young letter writer. This is the kind of transgressive data, where I started to re-examine my relationship with nature places and the mystic experiences of them, my own ways of knowing and being in the world. I grew up in the rural countryside of northern Finland, where I used to listen to my grandmother’s enthralling pantheistic stories of nature’s own mystique, mostly proof of her natural religion. She came from the formerly Finnish territory now lying behind the Russian border and this reflected how ‘she was of the world’ (Barad 2007, 185). Birds had special significance for my grandmother (and for me). Based on my own experiences, I have no difficulties placing myself into the letter writer’s world, climbing the stone, studying the creepy-crawlies and wondering in the face of the natural world. Through such processes, we may not need a common vocabulary, if any words at all.

Above, the letter writer introduces herself as an active, political actor who is ready to defend and protect forests and nature places. She orients towards the future and she will not give up, as she will continue to work with all the ‘things of nature’s own’. In her post scriptum, she raises the issue of binoculars and repeats her appeal:

Post scriptum. I’d like to thank the state so very much for the stone. By the way, the forest is now so barren that when I take the binoculars I can see the opening hours of the neighbouring shop (…) Dear president, I’m asking whether you could arrange so that more trees and plants would be planted? Would it be possible so?

With ♥ an 11-year-old girl

Places reach for other places and we always get to one place from another place (Strauss 1963, 319; Casey 2001, 690), and this is how we become enduring denizens of the place-world to which we so fatefully belong (see Casey 2001, 690).

Conclusion

In my letter data, place became a key means by which to tell new stories about the world. No doubt, experience is at the heart of what a specific place means and does for the letter writers. They do not experience just anything but experience things ‘in place’ (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, 1). This can be viewed as their place-world, which ties place and self together, in particular, lived place and geographical self. Place-world is not only perceived and conceived place but actively lived and, respectively, experienced place, as Casey (2001) asserts. As to place and self, there prevails a logic of ‘more with more’: more place, more self (687).

In this paper, forest girls’ experience in relation to specific places was considered. I approached place and self as thoroughly ‘enmeshed’ (Casey 2001), ‘entangled’ (Barad 2007) and ‘intertwined’ (Booth 2015). The letters portray a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the constructions and experiences that forest daughters have in their relationship with and experiences of places, forests in particular. The letter data are exceptional in their ways of showing how the places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play (see Philo and Wilbert 2000, 5). We are part of the world in its differential becoming (Barad 2007, 185). In the forest daughters’ letters, this idea about intra-action opened up in an interesting way, as it enabled viewing not only interaction between humans, but also intra-action between human and more-than-human (see Massey 2005, 140). The very specific place involved mystic wilderness and the letter writer celebrated an immediate experience of the unity of herself and nature, human and more-than-human.

I considered that letters ‘occur’ in places in relation to various experiences, imaginings, emotions and dreams. Methodologically, this paper responded to recent calls for a consideration of the ‘where of research’ (Anderson and Jones 2009; Anderson, Adey, and Bevan 2010; Booth 2015; Tuck and McKenzie 2015) conceptualised as the ‘where of a letter’. Place did actually make a difference for the research encounter. In order to capture the multiplicity of the research composition, an assemblage was deployed. The methodological assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’ performed as a temporary grouping of relations, where place, things, beings and happenings were involved. Birds, creepy-crawlies, trees, presidents, stones, binoculars, mattresses, letter writers and forests became agents in the same contextual world. In the same breath, as the girls insist, the forests serve as the lungs of the earth, and this applies to the neighbouring forests as well as the distant rain forests, all being the elements of the assemblage.

Actually, forests do not serve as the lungs of the earth whereas they produce oxygen that is vital to life. In the debates on forest and climate change, the importance of forests as a carbon sink has become a highly political issue nowadays. As to these political debates, it is striking to note how the Finnish debaters bring forward their experiences of themselves with forests, an intertwining of memories, both personal and collective, and how they display what a forest really means and does for them. In a broader sense, these representations can be approached as an assemblage where picnics in forests, pleasure, memories, carbon sinks, mystic wilderness, summer cottages and berry picking, among other things, intertwine in the statements analogously to the letter data. In a sense, a forest has a special value and it is a symbolic, concrete and political place in unison.

Within qualitative research, place is an emerging, welcome theme and alternative ways of engaging place meaningfully are taking encouraging moves (Booth 2015; Tuck and McKenzie 2015). As for this paper, it offers a fresh perspective to the discussion by identifying more intangible constituting elements of place and advocating the notion of assemblages as a methodological means, by which it sought to represent the unique quality of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005, 140), which place involves. Inevitably, also researchers are ‘thrown together’ and entangled within the assemblages they study, as I described.

The localisation of the forest girls’ environmental interests and their ways of being active are closely linked to green criticism, and their ‘green writing’ is a practice of their own environmental activism. As the letters of the data have been produced by writing a letter to the president, a distinctively political person, evidently the material became interpreted as bearing some political status. The term ‘political’ was broadly interpreted here and, in this paper, it was used in the way the forest daughters themselves conceive of and experience politics (see O’Toole 2003). Fighting and caring for nature is their role in the world, as they asserted. However, participating and developing these issues does not mean only writing, but also involves action and good deeds; in their letters, they suggest how to be an active citizen. Quite easily, they take the role of spokesperson for their own village, for the whole nation or the whole world.

The girls have a sense of agency and they do have ideas to accomplish radical and even utopian projects. The orientation of the letters has a forwards-looking momentum and the same future orientation follows in the forest daughters’ thinking as they direct their ideas towards the future. One girl makes an apt remark when she reminds the president that ‘I’m one of the young who will live in this world even after you. I just point out that you are building our future’ (Girl, age not mentioned).

Children develop their environmental and political sensitivity through direct encounters with specific places. Places come to be embedded in us, they become part of our very selves (Casey 2001, 688). It is a significant issue as to how children and young people become involved in these processes. St. Pierre (2004) discusses the Deleuzian ontology that is ‘built upon the not-so-controversial idea that how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it’ (285). She comes to the conclusion that ‘we might live differently if we conceive the world differently’ (290). I agree and argue that forest daughters’ letters are an extension to the view of how we might conceive the world differently.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their critical and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).