Paper short abstract:

My research aims to analyze the role that emotions play in a territorial conflict between contrasting ways of being, doing, and knowing, "worlding", or building worlds "in a world made of many worlds".

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on a methodological approach that involved visual ethnography and combined content and narrative analysis, my research aims to analyze the role that emotions play in the territorial-ontological conflict between the State of B.C., Coastal GasLink, and the Wet’suwet’en. Using high-quality online audiovisual material produced by the Wet’suwet’en –allowing a critical perspective, throughout the manuscript, on the politics of self-representation– I was able to get into the conflict with a phenomenological approach, employing my senses to analyze body movements, tone of voice, and language. Theoretically, I articulate a framework made up of Ingold’s phenomenology, Blaser’s ontological conflicts, and Escobar's studies of culture. Then, I build on the spiderweb, a metaphor developed by Ingold, to expand the scope of González-Hidalgo’s emotional political ecologies. The results show that Coastal Gaslink, taking culture “as a symbolic structure”, proposes as a central mitigation strategy –through their environmental impact assessment–, what I call “an ontological interruption” of the Yintakh. Besides, I demonstrate that the processes of political inter-subjectivation sought at the Unist’ot’en Healing Center help understand the worry, frustration, and stress of the Wet'suwet'en facing the world-creating practices of Coastal GasLink. On the other hand, the Healing Center also reveals how the affections for the other-than-human and their spiderweb (Yintakh or relational world) inform Wet’suwet’en resistance. Lastly, I unveil how Coastal GasLink and the Ministry of Aboriginal Rights, through practices of inclusion and gender equality, seek to blur radical cultural differences, delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en pre-colonial governance system, and create affections for the Western-modern world.

Paper short abstract:

I detail local forms of conservation from the Maya Ixil, embedded in linguistic and cultural practices and inherited from ancestral knowledge systems as they generate in-situ, decolonized forms of biodiversity conservation transposed upon the landscape in their co-produced food system, the milpa.

Paper long abstract:

A grassroots movement, identified as ‘buen vivir’ from Latin America and ‘living well’ from the Anglophone world, depicts Indigenous lifeways combating capitalist commodification of life through the performance of Indigenous identity with pre-Columbian origins. Decolonizing and revitalizing more-than-human health through these expressions, this paper draws upon translations of the larger buen vivir movement as they appear situated in the expressions of Maya Ixil culture and ontological perspectives. Through an engagement with the terms ‘tiichajil’, and ‘txaa’, an Ixil term for ancestrally-linked and culturally-Ixil organization of community norms, the paper seeks to understand and demonstrate how one Indigenous people regulate biodiversity conservation and its practice beyond hierarchies of oppression as they provide alternative lifeways that include and design for a more-than-human world. Conservation by design, this cosmologically-embedded and performed spiritual practice centers reciprocity as Maya Ixil identities are transposed onto the landscape in the form of the milpa food system. One actor in the multispecies assemblage of place, here Maya Ixil understandings of the human diverge from Cartesian divisions that lend easily to colonial capture and control, instead defining biodiversity conservation according to Indigenous epistemological understandings of agency where the human is equal to all other beings through the shared role of ‘caretaker’ and ‘nurturer’. I argue that the form of biodiversity conservation practiced by the Maya Ixil and other Indigenous caretakers collectively compose a decolonized, rights-based, feminist tool for imagining and creating a pathway toward a future beyond 7 generations by designing equality and justice for all of life’s forms.

Paper short abstract:

The plantation is a logic, form and structure through which inequalities are realised. We examine how the plantation subsumes social and ecological relations into capitalist regimes, explore resistance to plantations and consider possibilities for reparative and convivial futures.

Paper long abstract:

Plantations have shaped, and continue to shape, ecologies and societies. From the erasure of Indigenous ecologies to the exploitation of enslaved and bonded labour, the plantation is a human-nature entanglement that may be considered a logic, form and structure through which inequalities are realised. The continued development of plantations also drives the loss of biodiversity and results in greenhouse gas emissions. Attention is needed to better understand the plantation and imagine possibilities for sustainability and justice. With colleagues from multiple disciplines, we examine historical and contemporary perspectives on the ‘plantation’ and its processes of subsuming social and ecological relations into capitalist regimes through the appropriation of cheap natures, and the differentiated effects of these processes. We examine how plantation logics (of erasure, replacement, simplification, extraction, and exploitation) shape and reshape social and ecological relations beyond the boundaries of plantations through global markets and technologies, and resistance to these logics. We seek to explore processes of resistance to plantations and consider possibilities for convivial and reparative futures.

Paper short abstract:

The paper describes how a Bee Hotel (BH) project, part of a teacher education programme (U.K.), was informed by the insights of Donna Haraway. The resulting Harawayan BH is a promising educational tool to forge ‘sustainable’ relationships with nature for present and future generations.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of the Anthropocene has become a popular (and contested) term to describe the times we live in; among other things, it alerts us to the damage mainstream Western-centred anthropocentrism has wreaked on nature: in so doing, the Anthropocene signals that for life as we know it to continue, a more sustainable relationship with nature must be urgently implemented.

The paper will discuss a project that emerged as part of a teacher education programme (U.K.) where selected insights elaborated by Donna Haraway have been used to inform a Bee Hotel project. The resulting ‘Harawayan’ Bee Hotel (HBH) was used as a catalyst to help Trainee Teachers to both blend climate education into the standard curriculum to be delivered during their placements and, importantly, to introduce them to a new conceptualisation of nature. Specifically, Trainee Teachers were presented with, and encouraged to integrate into their teaching practices, a vision of nature that recognises and respects its uniqueness, agency, worth, and that accepts that some level of ecological instrumentalisation and destruction is necessary for human life.

The paper will argue that the HBH acts as a microcosm where it is possible to forge and practice, for both present and future generations, an ethics that encourages the establishment of a respectful relationship with nature, promoting and facilitating the meeting of a variety of SDGs.

Paper short abstract:

I would like to share and test my reflections on what recreating UK universities as sustainable pluriversities would require in light of Indigenous cosmovisions and knowledges, based on my encounters and engagement in three projects combining research and arts relating to socio-natures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper shares the author's reflections on what recreating UK universities as sustainable pluriversities would require from encounters and engagement in three projects combining research and arts relating to socio-natures: a training process led by a professional storyteller on converting political-ecology research into short, spoken 10-minute stories, the co-production of a role-playing game on 'sustainable' value chains, and the artistic and transdisciplinary research process producing an immersive audio-visual exhibition on 'Can we fly-less?'.

On this basis, the author argues that defining and then moving the academic space towards genuine 'sustainability' would be predicated on a reflective, self-critical engagement with the politics and ethics of research in the Anthropocene. This includes, but is not limited to firstly acknowledging colonial pasts, including the harmful, abiding roots of 'sustainability' imaginaries in colonial thinking, and the coloniality of conventional knowledge production as critiqued by feminist and decolonial scholars. It secondly involves overcoming extractive presents, including the Global North and the wealthy within it displaying an imperial mode of living which goes against researchers' commitments to 'doing no harm'. Finally, it proposes reimaging universities as 'pluriversities' which appreciate diversities of knowledges and prioritise equitable, sustainable co-production, including through collaborations with the arts.

Paper short abstract:

Ferme ornée is a public art commission that I am producing for the University of Reading campus, through which I am investigating the allegorical and political poetics of climate change, towards the potential for a non-didactic evocation of its structural relationship to power and knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

What use is art in the face of climate change? The complicity of art with the very forces of planetary demise and social inequality, despite, and often because of, its best intentions, make this a zero-sum question.

The artworks I am developing include photograms of meteorological storm-related phrases, inscribed in mud, reproduced as banners suspended from lampposts, and an 1800s gate designed ‘expressly for Ireland, America, and the Colonies’, emerging gilded and cock-eyed from the ground above a bronze relief of grass. A bridge that straddles the ornamental lakes will become an aeolian harp, singing in the wind as a siren or gale warning.

The work arises from a conflict of interests and imperatives that I see as inherent in the intersecting values of climate change and art production. Problematic universalism collides with Romantic individualism. The uselessness of art in the face of the arguably sublime monumentality of climate change. Didactic climate messaging typically self congratulates or averts the gaze.

Can we open a space in the midst of these competing demands that is both poetic and political, that embraces the useless as effective and affective non-productivity, that is inclusive yet undemanding?

Paper short abstract:

We unravel divergencies of narratives about social-ecological system in Mongu district, Zambia from the perspective of range of actors. We argue that social-ecological knowledge co-production is essential for bridging the diverse understanding of these complex realities that underpin sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

We critically reflect on results of participatory systems mapping of the social-ecological system in Mongu district, Zambia – key target area of the Czech development cooperation (CDC). Specifically, we explore plurality of perspectives on values, rulesm and knowledge emerging in the narratives about the social-ecological linkages, that exist among three actor groups and that directly underpin sustainability: (1) CDC actors based in Czechia, (2) CDC actors originating from and based in Zambia, and (3) local actors in the Mongu district, spanning from local citizens and experts to representatives of customary and statutory governance.

The results show that there is shared understanding of elementary social-ecological linkages across all types of actors. However, narratives about specific interactions between society and nature diverge and represent a diverse understanding of the complex web of challenges, opportunities and perceived solutions existing within the social-ecological system. Specifically, we illustrate that narratives about social-ecological realities differ along several dichotomies, among others, between international development actors and local actors, and between local actors with different levels of power and expertise. In particular, we identify mismatches in narratives of different actors that reflect on the role of customary and statutory governance processes in Mongu district, the understanding of the notion and role of the community, and role of values, rules, and knowledge related to sustainable livelihoods. Therefore, it is essential to bridge diverging narratives by knowledge co-production processes, that creates an opportunity window for unraveling and embracing multiple perspectives on the links between society and nature that underpin sustainability.