To flesh out the labor between humans and animals, I sometimes find myself struggling to write between the “real” and “representational” interactions I experience on farms and see on paper in the archive.
![](https://i0.wp.com/envhistnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/jon-tyson-XmMsdtiGSfo-unsplash.jpg?fit=640%2C853&ssl=1)
To flesh out the labor between humans and animals, I sometimes find myself struggling to write between the “real” and “representational” interactions I experience on farms and see on paper in the archive.
Why do we tell those eerie stories, the ones we share at social events? Ghost stories often reveal more about a community’s concerns at a specific point in time. One such example can be found in suburban Melbourne, Australia.
Now that I’m pursuing a doctoral degree in the highly interdisciplinary field of environmental history, I have come to embrace new research methods.
As I sit in my home in Serampore, India, flanked by the river Hugli and waiting for the already delayed Monsoons to arrive and bring with it some relief, in what has been a record-breaking and extraordinarily hot summer in India, I recognize that writing about water in place-based research is a self-defeating endeavor.