The Forest That Walks: Digital Fieldwork and Distributions of Site

Abstract

Walking is a practice that often centers humans as moving and experiencing subjects. Whether on solitary rambles or in collective social and political engagements, people are central to understanding places on the move. However, multiple organisms and environments are also involved in moving practices. This article decenters human movement to ask: How does the forest walk? In a time when forest sites might also be inaccessible to multiple people who are remote from forest locations, this article further considers how digital fieldwork becomes a way to tune into moving forests and the relations they activate and sustain. Digital technologies differently constitute and mobilize environments in ways that can have consequences for how forests and people move, and for how environmental change is configured and addressed.