What if we were stars in the sky, what kind of constellations would we make?
Phenomenological research, for me, is like stargazing with human stories. Each of us carries stories that may seem like mere specks of dust in the dark night of human existence, but together in our glimmering starlight, these stories become meaningful constellations.
Hermeneutic phenomenology: Shifting paradigms through research
If the goal is to heal the world, then research involves going back to the root of why we desire knowledge: to know more about who we are and why we exist in this world. Therefore, at its core, re-search is the pursuit to re-discover what we already know but have forgotten as human beings. Since we can never fully share our personal experiences with another, we can only learn about each other through the narratives of our experiences. To learn about humanity, we go through a process of storytelling and storylistening.
Traditional research, particularly approaches based on the scientific method, assumes that knowledge is objective and researchers must remain unbiased. However, human experiences do not exist in physical or psychological vacuums. We can communicate and make sense of the world only because we already have preconceptions of the world within us (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960).
Research must be biased because human experience is biased. To create new knowledge means to disturb old biases and re-establish new agreements of understanding.
Landscape as the mediator between our inner and outer worlds
Human experiences are always emplaced in a landscape. Therefore, to me, studying landscapes is also a part of disturbing existing narratives about our human existence. Through landscapes, we can evaluate our interpretations of nature and culture, consider the effect and limitations of language, acknowledge the reciprocity of life, and choose how to participate in the world.
If the world was metaphorically a garden, we would be the soil, the seeds, the plants, the designers, and the gardeners. We each play roles in all the processes of making the landscape a place we come to belong to. Our predicament: knowing when to take on a role, when to work with each other, and when to support another.
We can only clarify our ever-evolving roles by evaluating our past, present, and future participation in this landscape, individually and collectively. Our reflections are our stories. We can give space for more authentic individual stories so that more of our projected collective narratives can be broken open.
Knowledge from the fringes
Destructive psychological paradigms are perpetuated by our mind’s need to create knowledge hierarchies. That means, some forms of knowledge are validated (and institutionalised), some forms survive through resistance, while some forms are ridiculed and persecuted out of existence. To see our lives beyond specks of dust in the matrix of these old paradigms, we must learn to respect our own individual way of knowing and being in the world.
For example, I speak “academia” and “social politics” as much as I speak “New Age.” Decolonisation, neoliberalism, marginalisation, assimilation, crystal healing, law of attraction, twin flames, and chakras…these are all ways of interpreting the world. I had once been afraid of what others would think of me if I didn’t stay in an “approved” box of knowledge, but we can’t flourish, individually and collectively, if we deny our own knowingness.
Admittedly, some interpretations are more nurturing than others. So, at the end of the day, the way we want to see the world is still a choice—to see each of us glimmering in an expansive universe or as mere dust fading away into nothingness.
Projects, Reports, and Articles
Reclaiming the passive voice: Stories of women who leave landscape architecture, 2024
To disturb the dysfunction of historical patriarchy, as manifested in a gender gap in the case study of landscape architecture, this research study seeks out the most “useless” stories in the eyes of its system: the stories of those who are not part of the system any longer. In honouring the stories of these women first and foremost before using these stories for the system’s agenda, what is of value for an old paradigm shifts into a new narrative and paradigm that recognizes every human’s unconditional worthiness.
Nature, self, and being in the world: Revealing a flourishing ethics in landscape architecture through poignant landscape experiences (PhD dissertation), 2021
What do poignant landscapes mean to landscape architects? How do landscape architects envision their own flourishing? This is a self-reflexive research study that involved the analysis of 15+ professional association documents, 53 survey participants, and 14 interviews. This project was awarded a SSHRC doctoral scholarship and a LACF Annual Research Grant. A selection of excerpts from the research is also found in my book Poignant Landscapes.
The Romantic landscape: A search for material and immaterial truths through scientific and spiritual representation of nature, 2020
The interdependency between art, faith, and science in Romantic landscapes shapes our perceptions of landscapes today. The Romantics found Truth in Nature through religious and scientific interpretations of the world. The meaning of life was dependent on the search for revelation in the material and spiritual worlds, and landscape was a vehicle that allowed for this revelation.
The landscape of the Void: Truth and magic in Chinese landscape painting, 2016
Using Heideggerian hermeneutics and Chinese Daoism, landscapes can be seen as the literal and metaphorical Void between mortality and divinity, earth and sky. Disturbing what is subject and object, what is visible and invisible, I discover that the magic of landscape lies in the paradox: the in-between state where logic is inverted, Void is nothingness, truth is sought, and belief is magical.