19. Engaging remote sensing and ethnography to seed alternative landscape stories and scripts

In this chapter, I draw on experiences studying land and labor transformations in Sulawesi, Indonesia to reflect on practices for integrating remotely sensed (RS) and ethnographic research methods in a critical physical geographical account of socio-environmental relations. I offer three suggestions for going beyond the existing emphasis on eliminating barriers to integration to foster more convivial, generative, and flexible approaches to joining RS and ethnography. The first emphasizes the importance of staying with place and process in developing ‘intuitive’ approaches to integration. The second highlights how attention to the tensions between RS and ethnographic findings can deepen knowledge reflexivity while nuancing or even upending existing research understandings. The third explores how integrative instincts can inform approaches to re-fashioning RS and ethnographic methods, whether this involves more explicitly spatializing ethnographic research or leveraging RS to develop an ethnographically “thick” description of place-based relations.