The Floor Is Lava sets out to argue for and establish the epistemological advantages of nonnormative embodiment in theorising new perspectives on the subject/object ontological dichotomy. I explore this through the methodology of an autoethnographic expedition study via my wheelchair, in the Ashdown Forest. This is then developed through a series of writings recalling the physiological, psychological, material and sublime understandings of the experience; which are then used to inform a critique of existing literature and my own theoretical position and reflection. This unique autoethnographic methodology provides a framework which inherently questions the role of subjectivity in research, using the body, apparatuses, experiences, perception and specific context as both independent and interrelated facets of investigation. I argue that the indeterminable dependency of body and wheelchair creates an onto epistemological condition most closely linked to the work of Karen Barad and agential realism.. This entanglement questions the material and embodied ontology of the self, but more importantly highlights the role that non-normative embodiment and landscape can play in reevaluating our relationship to things, asking, if the floor is lava, am I safe? In order to respond to this question and expand the ideas of Barad, the work situates itself by critiquing discourse on objectivity, subjectivity, technology, determinism and ontology by thinkers such as Heidegger, Ingold, Harman, Hodder and Glanville, and instead proposes a new state of being aligned with feminist discourse which relates to the intimate technological entanglement embodied by disability.

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