Introduction

We are a/r/tographers who work in pre- and in- service teacher education in Australian universities. We write this chapter for researchers interested in encountering and conducting speculative creative inquiry. Data analysis in speculative a/r/tography is an active doing coupled with quiet reflection in the space of ‘not yet’. It is ‘less about discovering something pre- existing and more about constructing knowledge through the process itself ‘ (Reason, 2018, p 49). Doing data this way advances our understanding of small data via closeto- practice, aesthetically oriented, process- driven, human- scale analyses. This approach to data resists data imperialism and is decolonial, post- human, and activist in its politics – making way for a multiplicity of ontologies, knowledge systems, and methodologies. Our creative methods are informed by an interplay of methodology and pedagogy that contiguously respond to relational understandings of being an artist/ researcher/ theorist and the many creative (in- )betweens that being a practitioner affords. In this sense, we dance between theory and practice, whereby theory becomes data as much as the artefacts created in and through the a/ r/ tistic practice. As collaborators, we explore complex problems with similarly curious colleagues and students, bringing together multiple perspectives, sites, and spaces to assemble meaning (MacDonald et al, 2022). This is an important place to begin this chapter on creative data work because it positions where and how we do speculative a/ r/ tography and what the opportunities might be as you begin to play within creative possibilities.

A/ r/ tography has its roots in education (see LeBlanc and Irwin, 2019). However, our particular iteration of a/ r/ tography transcends the disciplinary boundaries of education, living and breathing across speculative inquiry, creative methods, and creative data analysis. A/ r/ tography renders its practices in ways that enable thinking with and doing through iterative and looping actions: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/ metonymy, reverberation and resonance, excess and absence, and gaze (Coleman, 2017). Our rendering of a/ r/ tography as speculative emphasises inquiry as being complex, imaginative, playful, and risky. Speculative a/ r/ tography enacts possibility thinking, ‘designerly’ ways of knowing and thinking, prototyping and failure in novel ways that other forms of a/ r/ tography might not.

Could COVID-19, this unexpected crisis, act as a comma in a co-research-creation project to become a breathing space and not a full stop? Maybe this pause is a colon: the two different periods of the project (and life in general) on either side of the pandemic, equally important and dependent on each other for full meaning. In this chapter, we tell the story of how a co-research-creation event (the Sci Curious Project) unfolded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; the lead-up to its irruption (St. Pierre, 1997) and then what came after. ‘Scicurious as method’ emerged out of the unexpected pause and recalibration of the project; a method that emphasizes the creation of research spaces that activate scicuriosity in situated practice. We understand scicuriosity as emerging from collaborative research-creation events that ignite curiosity and creativity. Scicurious as method is presented through an encounter with speculative fiction and scicurious zine travels. Scicurious as method has significant ethical implications, these reify the potential of co-designed speculative inquiries with creativity and curiosity at their heart. This is, in part, due to its contingency on cultivating digital co-research-creation spaces that enfold rather than eschew the analogue and highlight the joyous potential of a deeply situated, co-designed speculative inquiry; an inquiry with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) young people living in a pandemic.

About the research(ers)

We are an intergenerational co-research team from The University of Melbourne, Science Gallery Melbourne (SGM) and Science Gallery's Sci Curious advisory committee. Sci Curious are an advisory committee aged 14–25 that inform and shape the future of SGM exhibitions, public events and programmes. SGM is a new addition to the GLAM sector in Australia which shares Science Gallery International's mission to ignite curiosity where art and science collide (Gorman, 2010).

The rocky shores of the north-east Atlantic have been long studied. Our focus is from Gibraltar to Norway plus the Azores and Iceland. Phylogeographic processes shape biogeographic patterns of biodiversity. Long-term and broadscale studies have shown the responses of biota to past climate fluctuations and more recent anthropogenic climate change. Inter- and intra-specific species interactions along sharp local environmental gradients shape distributions and community structure and hence ecosystem functioning. Shifts in domination by fucoids in shelter to barnacles/mussels in exposure are mediated by grazing by patellid limpets. Further south fucoids become increasingly rare, with species disappearing or restricted to estuarine refuges, caused by greater desiccation and grazing pressure. Mesoscale processes influence bottom-up nutrient forcing and larval supply, hence affecting species abundance and distribution, and can be proximate factors setting range edges (e.g., the English Channel, the Iberian Peninsula). Impacts of invasive non-native species are reviewed. Knowledge gaps such as the work on rockpools and host–parasite dynamics are also outlined.

Introduction

The Caribbean region, south of Cuba (Figure 9–1A), forms one of the distinct lithospheric plates of the Earth's surface (Case and Holcombe 1980). Targets of a scale appropriate for GLORIA imaging are provided by tectonic disruptions of the seafloor along the plate's northern edge. We selected three areas to survey using GLORIA, which allows us to examine the variety of structures produced along this active plate boundary (Figure 9–1B). In the central Cayman Trough, plate motion and geometry cause extension, which creates a short spreading axis that is not connected to the world rift system; GLORIA is used to analyze the crustal structures that are created. Off northwestern Hispaniola, an irregularity in the plate boundary results in compressional motion, and GLORIA is used to analyze the accretionary wedge that is formed by sediments that are scraped off the North American Plate as it is forced against the Caribbean Plate. North of Puerto Rico, the plates appear to slide past each other with neither compression nor extension, yet, surprisingly, a major oceanic trench exists, which exhibits the world's greatest negative free-air gravity anomaly. Structural trends displayed by GLORIA and earthquake distribution are used to hypothesize the plate interactions that form the trench and analyze the response at a corner of a plate (the North American Plate) that is being overrun by another plate (the Caribbean Plate).

Tectonic setting of the Caribbean Plate

The Caribbean Plate is marked by clearly defined subduction zones to its east and west (Figure 9–1B).