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- Convenors:
-
Alex Wilkie
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Mike Michael (University of Exeter)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how ‘commoning’ operates with regard to metrology and metrological assemblages that mediate between aesthetic experience and knowledge practices and how these sensitise the researcher and researched to contemporary concerns regarding environmental and climate crisis.
Long Abstract:
Aesthetics – understood ontologically rather than phenomenologically – is a central feature of how socio-material events unfold insofar as the elements that compose such events make themselves commonly available to one another. Such ‘commoning’ entails the researcher as well as the researched in the process of the research event. This panel explores how this commoning operates with regard to metrology and metrological assemblages that mediate between aesthetic experience and knowledge practices. Specifically, we ask: how do modes of sensitization and measurement become available to – in common with - that which they measure? This is not a straightforward question as that which metrological devices measure are complexly configured to include not only the ‘thing’ being measured against an accredited ‘scale’, but a panoply of things and a heterogeneity of scales (including what might be call ‘lay metrologies’) that can implicate the socio-material, the affective, the narrative, the economic, and so on. The panel will focus on how we can operationalise this broad schema of commoning through aesthetic engagement practices that draw on social science, design, artistic disciplines and the environmental humanities. We are particularly interested in empirical examples or proposals ideally those that address contemporary climate crisis and environmental concerns as well as frameworks such as the Anthropocene or Chthulucene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Mike Michael (University of Exeter)
Short abstract:
Against standardised metrology, ‘lay metrology’ spans affect and narrative. ‘Size of Wales’ illustrates how lay units mediate cultural identity. Combining formal and lay scales to measure the physico-social extent of ecological damage, we ask inventive questions that embrace the Chthulucene.
Long abstract:
If metrology entails the standardisation of units not least for the purposes of various mathematical operations, ‘lay metrology’ entails units whose interconnections are more overtly multiple spanning the affective, the aesthetic, the narrative, the cultural and the sensorial. Illustrating this with the ‘Vague Ruler’, the paper will specifically examine how ‘area’ measured in standardised units (specifically as applied to environmental devastation) can be translated into folk units. Drawing on the charity ‘Size of Wales’, the paper discusses the ways in which the unit of ‘the size of Wales’ serves in narratively and affectively mediating cultural identity. The paper goes on to explore speculatively how one might go about bringing together - commoning - standardised and folk scales – that is, institutionalised and lay metrologies in order to invent ‘hybrid scales’ that might be used in ‘measuring’, for example’ the ‘physico-social’ extent of environmental damage. The aim of this exercise is to at once illuminate the implicit functioning of formal metrologies (and their tacit affectivities) and allow for the development of more ‘interesting questions’, including those that embrace such hopeful futures as the Chthulucene.
Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London) Israel Rodriguez-Giralt (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) Maria Cifre Sabater (Open University of Catalonia)
Short abstract:
This paper explores how wildfires in rural-urban edgelands might be understood as aesthetic events by enhancing the kinds of ‘social’ data available to wildfire management experts and response services.
Long abstract:
This paper explores how wildfire data and reporting might be enhanced with knowledge of ‘aesthetic’ experience that allows UK and European fire and rescue services, wildfire responsible agencies and government policy to better understand and manage wildfires that occur at wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). With the rise in global temperatures brought about by climate change, wildfires have become an increasingly hazardous socio-environmental risk at the interstices and edgelands that bifurcate the rural add the urban. Furthermore, fire scientists are now witnessing larger and more severe wildfires that exceed current wildfire models and such fires are expected to increase in frequency as the climate warms and protracted drought conditions become more frequent in the Europe and the UK. At present, wildfires remain poorly understood as sociomaterial events, as there is a distinct lack of ‘social’ data for wildfire analysis and modelling and, where such data does exist, it is somewhat crude, reflecting the rudimentary nature of wildfire data more generally. If, however, as Seghal and Wilkie argue (2024), knowledge and social processes are primarily aesthetic and, as Latour contended, new modes of sensitisation are required to address matters of concern, then new techniques for producing aesthetic data are required that supplement and enhance ‘social’ data. This paper proposes three techniques of more-than-human enquiry (Whatmore, 2002) that each explore different aspects of aesthetic engagement with social data and how data might become aestheticized. In so doing, the paper explores how aesthetic commoning might enhance wildfire management.
António Carvalho (University of Coimbra)
Short abstract:
This paper experiments with some of the tensions between distinct scales and ontologies of the Anthropocene, presenting research on affect and local sustainability transitions, public participation with Geoengineering and methodological prototypes fostering engagement with more-than-human forces.
Long abstract:
This talk explores distinct examples of aesthetic engagement with the Anthropocene, focusing on three case studies: the affective dimensions of sustainability transitions, public participation with Geoengineering and speculative methodologies to engage with more-than-human agency.
I am interested in exploring how these assemblages unfold distinct “scales” of the Anthropocene, enacting bodies, atmospheres and “otherness”. The presentation will rely on empirical data stemming from a research project on the ontologies of the Anthropocene in Portugal, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology between 2018-2022. It involved public engagement with Geoengineering (6 focus groups and a deliberative forum), 20 semi-structured interviews with members of the Transition Network and research on energy transitions, including the lithium mining controversy in Portugal.
This presentation will problematize how these assemblages thematize experimental engagements with the “Anthropocene”. “Inner transition” - a set of technologies of the self mobilized by the Transition Network – emphasizes embodied, aesthetic engagement with the climate crisis, enmeshing subjective and planetary ontologies. Public engagement with Geoengineering explicitly relied on fictional scenarios to frame climate and technological futures and their associated “ethicalities”, mobilizing ironic and trickster methodologies. The methodological prototypes put forward to engage with more-than-human agency complicated the frontiers between bodies, affect, the spiritual and the elemental, enacting multiple ontologies of environmental controversies.
I will delve into the tensions and (dis)articulations between these heterogenous scales and assemblages, speculating on how these modes of aesthetic and methodological engagement with the Anthropocene inevitably reshaped researcher(s) and researched.
Daniela Sant'Ana (University of Oslo)
Long abstract:
This paper is about encounters between ways of measuring how reindeer move and respond to wind turbines. Inspired by the salient literature on data, multispecies co-existence, and context, in STS and Anthropology, I take ethnographic insights from my collaboration with experts and published literature reviews and reports as my empirical site. My entry point are the contingencies of the encounters emerging in the field (e.g. conflict, assimilation, co-existence, mutual indifference, separation etc.). In Norway, impact assessments focusing on the before-after approach and relevant variables from established literature and quantitative data, without the influence of affected collectives, have documented herded reindeer grazing by wind farms and powerlines. In Sweden, collaborative impact assessments have questioned habituation as not unequivocally good for reindeer. In collaboration, while ecological scientists worked with the notion of cumulative impacts, herders' practices centered on the notion of grazing peace and their classification of winter conditions included a gradient between accessible and blocked lichen pastures. Herders were concerned that snow-blocked pastures push reindeer towards other sources of stress, and about the growing need for artificial feeding and intensive herding restricting free-ranging. What best explained the presence of reindeer near the turbines in the statistical models was not the presence of the turbines alone, as an attractor, but the avoidance of an area of lichen grounds blocked by poor snow conditions in the lower valley region. They reported the notion of increased tolerance to modernizing stressors describing nuanced reindeer behaviors and performing the differentiation of measuring practices and collectives.
Liam Healy (University of Sheffield) Sarah Pennington (Goldsmiths University of London) Tobie Kerridge (Goldsmiths) Louise Rondel (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Short abstract:
This paper reflects on the project Walking & Reading, conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023 to investigate the commons and commoning.
Long abstract:
This paper reflects on the project Walking & Reading, conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023. The starting points for the project were two-fold: to approach common land literally by engaging with the specifics of Sheffield’s long history of access movements and campaigns, while at the same time taking heed of the historian Peter Linebaugh’s call to treat commons as a verb; an action, process, or way of being, by considering the kinds of practice that are involved in commoning. Over the course of two weeks this consisted of Walking: being guided by local experts, repairing and maintaining footpaths and bridleways, seeking out old and forgotten pathways to map, trespassing by walking and swimming on private land, & Reading: reading the landscape and our affective experiences of it, while situating and discussing literature and theory on topics including enclosure and commons, repair and maintenance, mapping, infrastructures and access while we walked. This conceptual and physical journey was eventually distilled into a series of small publications containing stories, poems, audio pieces and films held together in a ‘pack horse library’; a coat that was designed to hold publications acting as a roaming (or rambling), expanding library.
Kaushik Ramu (FLAME University)
Long abstract:
This talk is concerned with standard time and the colonial observatory as a node of scientific archival. While the rationalization of time has largely been framed within narratives of disenchantment and protocols of governmentality, public irritation at time reform—as in the case of Bombay (1890s-1940s)—has been read for nationalist gestures of agency. Such unrest also expresses local standpoints of cosmology as recorded daily at sites such as the Bombay observatory. Amidst anxieties produced by colonial time reform, local and colonial time turned mutually irrational as soon as Greenwich became the (0,0) of temporal common sense. Yet scientific writing had its unrest too, as I show by close-reading two neglected sources: the 1943 records of the Bombay Observatory in Alibaug, and volumes of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) memoirs that cover the 1897 and 1905 earthquakes. In their folding of figurative and metrical registers, these records afford cartographies of shock and nausea from the Himalayas to Bengal to Iran. Are these intimations of the nervous geological body that eludes nationalism? Are they eddies of a wider affective pattern of unease, error, and remainder that anticipate the theme of planetarity? The ethics of empiricism--as I argue, drawing on Isabelle Stenger’s notion of idiocy and its reception in STS—rely on such formal and stylistic discrepancies in the scientific archive.
Sam Rumé (University of Manchester)
Long abstract:
In Cuenca, Ecuador, academics and planners have recently adopted the concept of tactical urbanism that is based on small-scale participatory experiments to make the city greener, more liveable and inclusive. These experts have developed various projects ranging from pedestrian zones to “complete streets” and “park(ing) days”. What is interesting about these initiatives is that, on the one hand, they partly attempt to overcome traditional participatory urbanism and its liberal understandings of democracy, deliberation and the public, by implying a form of participation that is aesthetic-experimental and practical. On the other hand, they are measured in detail and on the go by the experts in order to keep adapting them to the lived realities of the city. The spaces, movements, interactions, dwellings and other practices of inhabitants are thereby quantified, schematised and analysed to improve the more-than-human ecologies of the projects. However, my ethnographic research points to various shortcomings in these processes which need to be reflected upon in order to increase the potential of tactical urbanism. The latter concept has been distilled from many grounded stories and turned into a transnationally mobile repertoire of practical-aesthetic-political action. The pallet furniture, plant pots and colourful streets of tactical urbanism in Cuenca are inspired by this international trend imported by experts, instead of arising from the lived material interactions of neighbours. Thus, despite the tactical urbanists’ attempts to world new worlds through shared and calculated aesthetic-practical experience, certain ruptures and equivocations between experts, neighbours and spatial designs complicate the projects.
Tobias Olofsson (Lund University)
Long abstract:
The last twenty years have seen 3D documentation and modelling emerge as an important vector for methodological innovation in cutting-edge research in archeology. Adopting techniques such as photogrammetric modelling and laser scanning, archeologists are experimenting with new ways of producing and communicating knowledge; and they do so by innovating and developing new ways to record, report, and reconstruct archeological excavations, finds, and structures in three dimensions. However, the adaptation of these novel technologies has not been without its challenges and questions of standards, best-practices, and sustainable long-term storage linger while innovation keeps moving forward. In this paper, I present the results of a multi-sited ethnographic study of epistemic work and epistemic divides in contemporary archeology and highlight how the adaptation of digital 3D technologies has taken two different paths as two archeological paradigms – the processualists and the post-processualists – have developed diverging strategies for how to incorporate digital 3D into their work. While the processualists foreground the capacity of 3D recording and modelling to produce accurate and precise versions of the world and use 3D to make claims about the pasts they excavate the post-processualists approaches models as spaces with which to reflect on and document the interpretative process underlying their version of knowledge production in archeology. Exploring the differences between the two paradigms’ work with digital 3D technologies in knowledge production, I ask what implications they have for the practical work of digitizing the often embodied, multisensorial experiential data archeologists produce in the field and in the lab.