Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the almost invisible frictions that develop when different knowledges cultures attempt to work together and learn from each other. At a time when inter and trans disciplinary practice is championed, this paper considers the realities of these types of associations.

Paper long abstract:

Munekan Masha is a project initiated and devised by an indigenous group in Colombia called the Kogi. The project requires degraded ancestral territories be returned to the community after which it can be nursed back to health by Kogi practitioner experts. Simultaneously, conventionally trained environmental scientists will monitor and measure the environmental changes that the Kogi actions produce, and, in doing so, will encounter an alternative range of land management and conservation methods to their own.

This design will allow Kogi methods to be recorded for the first time. The Kogi apply different metrics to the landscape than conventional scientists and therefore, this project has the potential to provide an alternative approach to recognising, creating, and defining what constitutes, healthy or flourishing territories.

Recognising that these two fundamentally different knowledge cultures understand land health, land management and conservation very differently, anthropologists will work with both groups to record how each engages with and understands the other with a view to determine how, and if, dissimilar approaches must alter their worldviews to find synergies and determine if these differences can work together.

Paper short abstract:

By examining how members of the political organisation of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists utilise Marxism for their daily theory and practice, despite state repressions and exile, I highlight that academic debates must center the agency of social actors from the global South.

Paper long abstract:

Within the academic spheres of postcolonial theory, much has been written on how Marxism can be drawn on and, what the relations between Eurocentrism and Marxism are. Yet often arguments of the incompatibility of Marxism and postcolonial theories, let alone the “postcolonial world”, ignore the frictions and differences within both canons. In practice, Marxism remains a core analytical framework for many emancipatory movements in the global South on a daily basis.

It is through agency of social actors in the global South that Marxism does travel, is translated, (re)read, debated, and embedded. As alternatives to capitalism and a better world are strived for globally, I focus on how activists from the global south utilise their anti-capitalist critique as a framework for their political practice on the ground while producing knowledge beyond Western academia.

By specifically focusing on how members of the political organisation of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists grapple with Marxism, I examine how debates on eurocentrism, dogmatism, decoloniality and beyond are engaged with and translated into theory and practice by Marxist social actors from the global South themselves. Through my ethnographic field research with Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists in exile and the underground, I highlight that much of the academic postcolonial debates on Marxism and Eurocentrism often sideline the agency of social actors from the global South, their theoretical and practical endeavours and own modes of knowledge production. This, I argue, should be given much more weight in a contemporary understanding of Postcoloniality, the Left and the crises we face.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I explore how indigenous ontologies can help pluralize legal ethics beyond ecological romanticism. I suggest that imagining a habitable planet may imply opening law to knowledges and practices based on respect and care, often not apprehensible through scientific knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

In a recent communication to the UN, the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) proposes to hold the Brazilian State accountable for violating the right to a healthy environment, arguing that the Brazilian Amazon and savannah are important for planetary ecological balance. In another document, a 2021 complaint of genocide and crime against humanity presented to the ICC, the destruction of the Amazon carried out by Bolsonaro’s government is treated as ecocide.

Both have a wide and diverse scientific base, produced within universities, think tanks, and civil society organizations. The indigenous peoples who inhabit these territories, however, have their own explanatory versions of why the forest should not be destroyed. For the Yanomami, the urihi a (land-forest) is a cosmological complex inhabited by an infinity of sparkling spirits (Kopenawa and Albert, 2010; Sztutman, 2004). The urihi a is, then, alive and the subject of an ethical relationship. However, the Yanomami are not the only indigenous people who extend their ethical notions to non-human entities, as shown by the writings of Deloria (1999) and other indigenous intellectuals.

In this presentation, I intend to explore how the Yanomami relationship with land can help pluralize legal ethics beyond ecological romanticism. Indigenous political ontologies (Blaser, 2013), when opposed to the abstract and generalizing thinking of law, show us that imagining a planet that is habitable in the future requires taking into account practices shaped by relationships of respect and care, often not apprehensible through scientific knowledge's objectifying logic (Viveiros de Castro, 2004).

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how ex-subsistence farmers are realising alternative relations to the natural and built environment within Barcelona's public spaces. Who has the right to shape Barcelona, and its' citizens', relation to the natural world?

Paper long abstract:

Urban spaces are predicted to host 68% of the global population by 2050. While the Spanish countryside has been re-filled with macro-farms and monocultures, many rural peasants have moved to cities to be imbibed with urban modalities that erase land knowledge and re-orient relations to the natural world to bourgeois green spaces, such as 'ornamental' parks. Since the 19th century, Barcelona has been designed by fleets of white-collared specialists who (un-)consciously engender novel relations to the more-than-human world. Urban architectures and economic models influence sociality, occupations, and epistemic binaries such as nature/culture and urban/rural. In Barcelona, despite the ultimate design of the city being determined by specialists, often drawing from hard-to-access scientific methodologies, there are thousands of rural migrants in the city who realise alternative relations to their environment, bringing knowledge from the 'rural' areas in which they migrated. Urban food gardens, which have rapidly increased since the 2008 financial crash, are one of the primary faces of grassroots reshaping of public space. My talk will draw from my doctoral fieldwork, exploring an urban garden run by Spanish ex-subsistence farmers. My participants' embedding of an ecologically holistic way of existing in the post-industrial area of Sants opens novel modes of co-existing with the multi-species elements of the city through their rejection of urban cultures of 'nature'. Considering Barcelona's high pollution levels and increasing heat, this paper will open discussions around the possibilities for the city's rural migrants to collaborate on Barcelona's needed re-orientation to the natural and built environment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores whether participatory and transdisciplinary approaches can enable more impactful and appropriate solutions to climate change by examining how community and expert knowledge are contested and enacted by multidisciplinary expert partners in a climate change initiative (CCI).

Paper long abstract:

The collaboration between scientific expert knowledge and locally embedded community knowledge systems has been increasingly promoted as they are deemed to hold the potential for creating more appropriate, adaptive, and sustainable solutions to climate change. However, these collaborations often lead to messy, complicated and contradictory outcomes.

Consequently, questions have been raised about whether collaborations between experts and community members can ever enable more comprehensive and encompassing ways of knowing the world or whether that is cruel optimistic hope that can end up reinforcing social, cultural, and political patterns of exclusion, oppression and inequality.

This paper argues that in order to understand what factors shape how scientific and community collaborations play out it is necessary to pay attention to how community and expert knowledge is itself contested and enacted continuously.

To explore these issues paper will draw on initial findings from an EU Horizon 2020 Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) project involving 19 partners across 3 continents and communities in 6 European countries. It will examine the project partners, including the authors themselves, as a complex and contingent communities where knowledge is continuously shaped in relation to unfolding everyday practices and socio-spatial entanglements.

Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and community engagement activities it will draw out how knowledge, research and collaboration practices are contested, reconfigured, and stabilised by project members and how these processes are intertwined in attempts of navigating precarious lives, bureaucratic tensions, and fluctuating norms, aspirations and emotions.

Paper short abstract:

Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, is a landscape that has been socialised by fire over millennia. While Aboriginal burning regimes have continued from pre-colonisation to the present day, contemporary fire knowledge is the result of a complex intercultural co-production of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

While touted in tourism materials as a ‘wilderness’, Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, is a landscape that has been socialised by fire over millennia. Aboriginal peoples' burning practices have resulted in a fire-adapted and fire-dependent landscape, and today a diverse range of land managers in Cape York engage in fire management. Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle graziers, and Park rangers each implement early dry-season burning, intended variously to encourage fresh growth and reduce the vegetation’s fuel load, minimising the risk of hotter, out-of-control wildfires later in the season. These ‘cool burns’, alongside an additional type of burning called ‘storm burning’, are considered to comprise an effective fire regime. Fire knowledge originated with Aboriginal traditional owners. However, decades of engagement in the multi-ethnic pastoral industry have resulted in contemporary burning practices that are interculturally mediated. The Australian government’s carbon sequestration scheme (widely seen as a partial solution to environmental issues and Indigenous economic disadvantage) has further transformed local burning practices, generating new forms of burning and critique. As such, even in Cape York, where fire regimes have continued from pre-colonisation to the present day, fire knowledge has shifted and changed, with further transformations likely due to the changing climate and spread of invasive species. Through examining the intercultural context of burning in Cape York and complicating simplified narratives around static and unchanging Indigenous knowledges, I question what it means to talk about cultural burning here and, in doing so, disrupt some of the accepted wisdom around fire management in Australia.

Paper short abstract:

Australian Indigenous songs and dances are considered ways of celebrating and reactivating relations of mutual care among living forms, re-enlivening the past, and transmitting knowledge to the younger generations.

Paper long abstract:

Ritual songs and dances in Indigenous Australia have been mainly studied as expressions of a complex cosmogony distributing groups across vast regions, celebrating their unique cultural identity, and a way of asserting and negotiating their political authority over others. Yet the significance of music and dance in recording, sustaining, renewing, and transmitting ethnobiological knowledge has been neglected (Curran et al. 2019). Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Northeast Arnhem Land, the paper explores how Indigenous song and dances are a repository of environmental knowledge as they describe in detail the complex mutual physiological, social, and emotional interdependence and cooperation among people, places, other beings, and life forms. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which songs and dance celebrate relationships of nurturance, care, and affect in order to re-enliven the past, transmit knowledge to the young generations and nourish the land so that the land can keep on nourishing people.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines people’s changing relationship with a post-industrial landscape in South Wales. It explores creative methodologies, working with earthy matter, to show how re-engaging with these might enable conversations about the social and physical impact of the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation draws attention to people’s relationship with the matter of the earth; it highlights how we are materially embedded through our engagement with earths, soils and clays and that ‘when we heal the land we heal ourselves’ (Steffensen 2019, 235). We explore how creative practice and material engagement can provide a (safe) place to talk, share ideas and learn. Using clay as a starting point, we hope to open up conversations between artists, academics and local communities about the trials of living on a damaged planet, specifically within the relict coalmining landscapes of South Wales.

Drawing upon Helen Acklam’s art project, What it is to be there, we are developing a methodology to explore how people perceive of and interact with earthy matters, as part of a future project in the Garw Valley. Our aim is to repair the suture between an impoverished and largely voiceless community and the world around them and also to communicate the meaning and value (of the earth). Pilot studies have demonstrated the physical and emotional benefits of working with clay in small groups within a relaxed environment. Co-collaborating with – handling, shaping, walking in – locally sourced clays and focusing on somatic, sensual experiences provides a space for sharing stories, while haptic engagement with clays reveals the corporeal connection between people, material and place. The ultimate aim of attending creatively to the matter of the earth while listening to local knowledges, is to give voice to local communities and to their material world.