Mingxin Li

This practice-based thesis develops (re)present with as a situated methodology for supporting intergenerational environmental knowledge transmission at the community scale. It begins from a representational problem: environmental change is not only described through maps, surveys, classifications, policy categories and scientific images; it is also materially shaped by them. In མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige), at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, national development, conservation and restoration schemes have repeatedly represented the land through external categories, including marshland, wetland, biodiversity hotspot and carbon-rich peatland. These representations have made མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige) legible as an object of productivity, ecological protection, restoration and climate governance, while often leaving less room for local ways of knowing the land as a shared living space for humans, animals, deities, waters, grasses and other more-than-human beings.

The thesis asks how research might move from representing མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige) as an object of knowledge towards (re)presenting with the human and more-than-human relations through which local environmental knowledge is formed, maintained and transmitted. Drawing on participatory and community-based action research, and informed by Indigenous research frameworks, the thesis understands research not as a pre-designed intervention but as a collective process shaped through long-term engagement, local ethics, lived experience, everyday labour and situated accountability. As a researcher working with local pastoral communities, I also examine how my own positionality, methods and assumptions were unsettled through fieldwork, hospitality, language, friendship, familyship and shared environmental practice.

Drawing on early engagements with མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige) from 2021 and sustained fieldwork between 2023 and 2025, the thesis traces three connected movements. First, it analyses how state-scientific modes of representation have participated in མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige)’s socio-environmental transformation. Second, it develops the concept of མཛོད་དགེ (Zoige) as a plurihome: a place shared across different scales by humans and more-than-human beings. Third, it examines how collective practices — including environmental memory sessions, a letter to the community, seed collection and collective grass seeding — became situated conditions through which local knowledge could be recalled, re-created, questioned, circulated and acted upon.

The thesis argues that (re)present with does not offer a universal model for environmental restoration or community participation. Rather, it proposes a methodological orientation for practice-based research concerned with environmental representation, community knowledge transmission and situated accountability: one that understands representation as a relational, ethical and material practice. Through this orientation, architectural practice is expanded beyond buildings, plans or spatial images, and becomes a way of making and sustaining situations in which land-based knowledge, collective care and socio-environmental relations can continue.