Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Sophie Chao
(University of Sydney)
Anne Galloway (Victoria University, Wellington)
Laura McLauchlan (University of New South Wales)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel explores current and emergent approaches to understanding and reconfiguring multispecies relations. We seek ethnographic, theoretical, multi-modal, and/or interdisciplinary papers that articulate expansive, capacious, and relational approaches to the more-than-human world.
Long Abstract:
Every day seems to bring more stories of multispecies suffering and planetary unraveling. Responses to the fires that ravaged Australia in the Black Summer of 2019-20 made it clear that the 'natural world', and not only humans, can suffer injustices. To our collective detriment, Indigenous understandings of human-environment relations remain systematically excluded. In the face of these contemporary realities, how well are the existing rules, norms and institutional processes that structure our responses to injustice faring? What can be learnt from Indigenous worlds and worldviews, and how can they be better recognised and restored? How might our responsibility for/with other lives shift in relational perspective(s)? What opportunities and challenges emerge when we apply culturally specific (human) concepts like 'justice' to other forms of life? In the face of violence and calls for reckoning, where do 'good relations' already exist, and persist? How do forgiveness, kindness, and love continue to operate in everyday life? What mending practices are being undertaken, and at which scales? We seek ethnographically grounded contributions inspired by situated locales and ecologies, as well as interdisciplinary and theoretical papers. Multi-modal presentations (e.g. film, poetry, and visual art) are also strongly welcome.
Read more about the panel participants here: https://sophiechao.wixsite.com/aas2021
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
'Shifting perspectives' is a short film opening an interdisciplinary dialogue across dance, visual arts and synthetic biology. The film addresses how collaborating with microorganisms can transform our cultural assumptions, and reshape our future in a more-than-human world.
Paper long abstract:
'Shifting perspectives' is a short experimental film inspired by a conversation between two leaders in the field of synthetic biology (Sarah Richardson and Tom Knight) and their divergent approaches to working with microbial life (Grow, 2019). The film was developed by anthropologist and choreographer Sarah Pini in collaboration with Jestin George, biotechnologist and visual artist, and Melissa Ramos, visual artist and filmmaker, during a Responsive Residency at Critical Path, Sydney, in April and May 2020. Aim of this work is to open a multivocal interdisciplinary dialogue across dance, visual arts and synthetic biology, the redesigning of biological systems, which could offer an alternative option, a living, growing, biological technology. Such an alternative would be capable of disrupting many fossil-fuels based industries and reshaping technology as we know it. As we try to move towards a future based on a bio-economy, how do we align with the possibilities of designing with life? And can we make space for the non-human life we aim to become so heavily reliant upon? Grounded on a feminist post-humanist approach that recognizes a continuity between all living creatures, including plants, animals, microorganisms and humans (Haraway, 1991), this project addresses how synthetic biologists engage differently with these organisms. By shifting our perspectives, this work suggests how collaborating with microorganisms can challenge and transform our cultural assumptions, and reshape our future in a more-than-human world.
Watch the film here: https://youtu.be/0Z00y1aV-8g
Paper short abstract:
In an ethnographic study of Aotearoa New Zealand's war against microorganism-induced forests diseases, what would it take to seriously consider more-than-human agency? This talk is an invitation to sit, breathe and let your eyes adapt as you track for the very visible impact of invisible agents.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is a methodological provocation. It is based on 24 months of fieldwork between plant pathologists and Māori traditional experts, immersive walking through healthy and declining forest ecosystems, and nine kauri seedlings growing on my desk to avoid the winter frosts of Te Wai Pounamu (New Zealand's South Island).
It all started with a question: In an ethnographic study of Aotearoa New Zealand's war against microorganism-induced forests diseases, what would it take to seriously consider more-than-human agency? Deeply inspired by the observations of Māori elders, I walked through the entanglement of time, space, matter, and meaning, tracking scientific research, citizen-science programs, and policy-making in biosecurity, and came up with a different question: in a time of biosphere collapse, how are we not taking non-human actions more seriously? Sometimes called "the unseen", Māori trust the powerful ancestors who rule winds, rains, storms, the course of life. Invisible too to the naked eye are the microorganisms driving a radical transformation of Aotearoa's forests. Biosecurity management overlooks droughts, floods, windstorms, and changing weather patterns because those are variables that escape human control.
This talk will invite you to look beyond disciplinary boundaries, direct into the eye of a multispecies collapse, paying special attention to non-human agency... even when it is invisible.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my experience as part of the “Learning Endings” project led by Patty Chang, Astrida Neimanis and Aleksija Neimanis, this poem is a record, a reflection, a tribute to the scientists I spoke to, the animals who died away from their home, and the more-than-human care explored by the project.
Paper long abstract:
In the age of plastic, pollutions, and disconnection, ocean space becomes increasingly lethal to their own inhabitants. Marine creatures are getting lost, suffering from hunger, and separated from their families due to a multitude of anthropogenic causes. Some came close to the shore, became stranded and eventually died. In these cases, humans may be called to help, and to care for the stranded marine animals in different ways. Among these encounters, necropsy is a unique practice that is conducted by scientists.
In early 2021, international artist Patty Chang, cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and wildlife pathologist Aleksija Neimanis gathered their forces and started the interdisciplinary project “Learning Endings”, seeking to explore ‘what cetacean strandings and deaths teach humans about our relationship to oceans and their ecologies’. Drawing on my experience working as part of the project as a research associate, and some preliminary findings, this poem reading (estimated around 5 minutes) is a record, a reflection and a tribute to the scientists and conservationists I spoke to, the animals who died away from their home, and the kind of more-than-human care envisioned by “Learning Endings”. In particular, this poem imagines necropsy as a mode of labouring, mourning and worlding. How might the fragmentation of a dead body as part of a necropsy offer a conduit to confront fraught contemporary ecological relations and to become whole? Amidst the sixth mass extinction, how might scientists’ attending to individual dead animals resist the abstraction of death?
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how synthetic biology – which takes an engineering approach by editing DNA to alter nature – might challenge, change or bolster Indigenous Australian multi-species relations, and vice versa, to explore concepts of kin, care, and ethical responsibilities for the future.
Paper long abstract:
As an emerging novel technology, synthetic biology (synbio) takes an engineering approach to biology by editing DNA. Synbio applications may offer creative approaches to existing environmental challenges such as invasive species management or making native species more resilient to a warming climate. But what happens when a multi-species lens is applied to synbio? What we can learn from Indigenous Australian ontologies that see plant and animal species not as separate to, but rather an extension of, human kin? How might cuts and changes in DNA be perceived in Indigenous understandings of continuity, kin and care? This paper will explore how synbio techniques that alter nature might challenge, change or bolster Indigenous Australian multi-species relations and identity. Conversely, a multi-species lens may challenge existing synbio assumptions by collapsing human/non-human categories to reshape ethical as well as regulatory responsibilities for the future.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, we share fragments of letters, emails and tweets seeking to feel-think (sentipensar) our commitments to the work of tending to what our multispecies fields have taught us, particularly as they take us outside of binaries of kindness or killing, death or life.
Paper long abstract:
There is a curious history of anthropologists dreaming to one another through letters (Goodwin-Hawkins and Meher 2019:114). In this piece, we offer fragments of our own conversations—both past and yet-to-come—through which we attempt to feel-think (sentipensar cf. Fals Borda 2009, Escobar 2014, 2018) human-animal relations outside of binaries of life or death, killing or kindness. As anthropologists committed to an ethics in which love for the world involves recognising our gifts and responsibilities, we reflect on the practices, cares and challenges of tending to the “critical promise of the field” (Pandian 2019:3). In our cases, often literal fields of grass raise ideas and ways of knowing that are challenging to express in words, and can disturb those who would be our allies. With a commitment to living our responsibility and gratitude for lives shaped with sheep, hedgehogs, and their broader multispecies worlds, we explore how we might do the work of responsively tending to love, life and death (McLauchlan 2019). We offer these fragments as a mode of “writing with care”—of writing in a way that acknowledges and reflects vulnerability and uncertainty (Garcia 2010:35). This writing also becomes a way of seeking small community in what has been described as the loneliness of anthropologists (Goodwin-Hawkins and Meher 2019: 114). Together we explore what emerges when we commit to holding what seems unreconcilable, and asking how we might make space for more, not fewer, ecological and ethical possibilities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).