Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Mayline Strouk
(STIS, University of Edinburgh CWTS, Leiden University)
Bronte Evans Rayward (University of Cambridge)
Oscar Hartman Davies (University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The contemporary environmental crisis requires the development of creative conversations and storytelling. We invite STS scholars to interrogate these challenges further by responding to past or present, diverse seabird lifeworlds.
Long Abstract:
Seabirds are beings whose trajectories often encompass the sea, the sky, and the land. By seeking to understanding seabirds as individuals within species, or as ‘atmospheres’ (Lorimer et al. 2017) or ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991), or with other theoretical approaches, we might tell varied environmental stories and open opportunities to think through forms of geographical boundary-making. Seabirds can provide the opportunity to interrogate the construction and preservation of networks of interactions that exist within, outside and across environmental, social, political, and economic boundaries.
We draw from research into animals' mobilities (Hodgetts and Lorimer 2020), animal atmospheres and multi-species agencies and consider these literatures within the context of STS research discussing circulating knowledge and networked construction of place. We encourage a variety of approaches to explore the materiality and spatiality of ocean beings circulating above and sometimes below sea level.
It is common to many seabirds that their foraging ranges traverse vast geographies. Seabirds often display a lifeworld to humans that converge interactions across marine, aerial, and terrestrial space and thus blur the varied political, economic, and environmental contexts often understood as bounded territory, or somehow geographically distinct.
We welcome empirical and conceptual contributions seeking to go beyond a one-dimensional approach to ocean space and materiality, whether seabirds are their primary research subject or peripheral in their analysis. We hope to receive papers related (but not limited) to:
- Historical perspectives on seabirds
- Seabirds as technologies and technologies for seabirds
- Seabirds as sentinels of climate change
- The blue economy and its effect on seabirds’ life trajectories
- Seabirds as lively capital and/or commodities
- Seabirds as charismatic/invasive species
- Speciesism and multiplicity of seabirds
- More-than-human geographies of field science (Forsyth, 2014)
- Seabirds as a metaphor (of what?)
- Other flying animals encompassing material dimensions and bounded geographies
Accepted papers:
Session 1Catherine Oliver (Lancaster University)
Short abstract:
On Morecambe Bay, seabirds are an intimate part of socio-ecological life. This paper draws on more-than-human ethnographies to explore how seabirds, the people who watch them, and the ecology itself produce a “polyrhythmic bay.”
Long abstract:
Two decades ago, Morecambe Bay in the northwest of England was described by ecologist JB Whittaker as a “laboratory for climate change”. Its rich and diverse landscapes serve as critically important ecological habitats. Morecambe Bay is the largest intertidal zone in Britain, covering 310km2 and the twice-daily retreat of the tide reveals sands crammed with worms, crustaceans, and shellfish. Each year, this tide is followed by a quarter of a million birds who feed and rest there, making it one of the most important sites for migrating seabirds in Europe.
Morecambe – one of the major towns on the Bay – is a quintessential ‘left behind’ British seaside town of whirring arcades, fish and chips, and faded fortunes … and seagulls. Social, environmental and climate change has disturbed the rhythms of the Bay, its humans and its seabirds, leaving the Bay distinctly out-of-time.
Drawing on more-than-human ethnographic research with the Bay, its humans and its seabirds, I conceptualise the Bay as a system of organic and technological ‘polyrhythmic arrangements’ (Pokorný, 2021). In doing so, I explore how layered and networked social, environmental, and avian rhythms provide insight into the temporalities and spatialities of climate change as a more-than-human experience, and ask what this means for the Bay’s futures.
Izabelle Grimm
Short abstract:
On the gap between Seagull and Gull. How does language create or prevent empathy and narrative? How can "good science" value speculation and subjectivity? Where does this come in while doing conservation work?
Long abstract:
The rules of working in a Seagull Colony start and end with the fact that there are no such things as Seagulls. The “correct” term, according to our research team, would be gull or Larus, and if a researcher slipped up in the field they were quickly belittled by the rest of the crew. I argue that in the term Gull allows for a scientist’s objectification of the bird, whereas the colloquial term Seagull gives room to narrative as a tool for ecological empathy. Here, I draw on the theory of Speculative Fabulation (Harroway, 2016). As what I would call an Uncharismatic Native, finding the narrative in Seagulls is especially important when their population is in decline. At the Edward Mc.C Blaine Research Station and the Alice Eno Field Research Station, found on separate islands off the coast of Maine, I spent a collective six months participating in a behavioral study of Herring Gulls and shooting a 20 minute wildlife documentary. There, I was taught to avoid anthropomorphism, subjectivity, and intervention. However, I argue that these three things are essential to the relationship between human and non-human. In this multimedia-rich talk, I tell a story of gulls, with reference to Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, the controversial work of Hunt and Hunt’s 1977 study, Female-Female Pairing in Western Gulls (Larus occidentalis) in Southern California, and Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway.
Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen)
Short abstract:
This paper explores how seabirds reveal complex, weird and precipitous ecological changes at sea. Analysis of scientific research and the observations of birders reveals a strange matrix of human interpretations of and avian responses to ecological shifts, making them perceptible but always opaque.
Long abstract:
The sea is at the heart of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Sea level rise, surface temperature changes, shifting ocean currents, overexploitation, storms, pollution, and disease all profoundly affect marine environments, but these effects can be hard to discern and disentangle. This paper explores the ways in which seabirds reveal the complex, weird and precipitous ecological changes at sea. It does this through a discussion of both scientific research and the observations of birders, particularly in British waters. Birders who conduct seawatching, the practice of monitoring seabird movements from land, often notice changes in movements and distribution at early stages and this paper examines the ways they interpret these as indexical of wider ecological shifts before scientific research provides more concrete, though still partial, explanations.
Seabirds are unusual indexes of environmental change because on the one hand they are highly mobile and long-lived but on the other, they are restricted to dense colonies in specific places for breeding and are acutely vulnerable to extreme weather and disease outbreaks. This can lead to long periods when ecological shifts are concealed, but which are then followed by rapid or catastrophic effects on populations. These effects include losses from avian influenza, starvation or storms, and distributional and seasonal shifts linked to warming sea temperatures and consequent prey movements. Since seabirds have varied capacities to deal with different kinds of change, they reveal a strange matrix of responses and potential causes that render marine ecologies perceptible but always opaque.
Oscar Hartman Davies (University of Oxford) Mayline Strouk (STIS, University of Edinburgh CWTS, Leiden University) Bronte Evans Rayward (University of Cambridge)
Short abstract:
In this presentation, we discuss three separate projects looking at cases of scientific research on seabirds to provoke conversations about the varied production, and representation, of knowledge of specific seabird species in multiple local contexts.
Long abstract:
In 1977, John Berger called for citizens to again ‘look’ at animals, to encounter them as agent fellow-beings. Here, we reconfigure Berger’s provocation to the task of looking at seabirds, and those who observe seabirds. Doing so, we aim to spur conversations about representations of a group of animals which cross vast areas, landscapes, and materialities.
We present three case studies that reveal tensions in harnessing certain species for science or conservation. The first investigates how gentoo penguins are made visible, and for what purposes, in the annual Falkland Islands Seabird Monitoring Program (FISMP). The second discusses seabird conservation on Skomer Island, specifically the relationship between the Islands famous Atlantic puffin population, and its lesser known and viewed Manx shearwater population. The third case considers how seabirds become visible, or not, in the electronic monitoring of fisheries, with reference to a seabird bycatch monitoring trial in southern England.
In each case, seabirds are represented for varied reasons. Sometimes to support competing objectives, such as environmental conservation, marine resource exploitation, or to justify narratives of belonging to place. Often, specific species are foregrounded, simplifying seabirds’ complex, interconnected lifeworlds. Narratives built around particular species can support research or conservation measures, but can also reduce the visibility of other less ‘charismatic’ species, and serve to naturalise particular ways of knowing and governing ecologies. Understanding the functions of specific representations of seabirds offers potential methodological insights for multi-species research, and is fundamental to ensuring convivial relations with specific seabird species in dynamic local places.
Theophile Robert (University of Aberdeen)
Short abstract:
Herring gulls occupy cities in the United Kingdom. From Aberdeen, I propose we look at gull occupation and exploitation of human environments as acts of resistance to humans, as gulls are confronted with drastic changes in the composition of their environments and, hence, ways of life.
Long abstract:
Herring gulls populate many cities in the United Kingdom. They are often demonised and hated: gulls trash cities, steal food, occupy place. In Aberdeen, “scurvies”, as they are called, roam everywhere around the city. They are pests, but are defended by the Wildlife Act: hence, enjoy relative peace from humans who nonetheless consider them “nuisance birds”.
In this paper, I look at seagulls from the framework of multispecies anthropology and environmental history, from the viewpoint of the gulls, by reframing the seagull colonization of the inland narratively. Originally a bird living in cliffs on coastal areas, they relocated in inland environments, particularly cities and wastelands. On the other hand, their primary environment, as well as primary source of food, became less and less available as human exploitation grew, all the while humans produced more and more waste that they could exploit for their own need.
Looking at the interactions between humans and gulls in Aberdeen, where seagulls often directly interact with humans, I propose that we understand their “nuisance”, or occupation of cities, as a political move, where gulls try to reintegrate a world that has been partly taken away from them. By occupying cities, for which their former habitat was overexploited, seagulls became intricately tied with humans, being both subjugated and resisting human dominion. Hence, I argue stealing, attacking humans, or searching trash should be understood as political ways of resisting humans, who took their possibility of living by the sea.