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- Convenors:
-
Aadita Chaudhury
(York University)
Rita Valencia (CIESAS Sureste)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Inspired by underexplored aspects of artistic practice and its role in environmental research, this panel invites traditional papers, artworks and other creative interventions that examine the place of intuition in creating a more emancipatory vision of a decolonial environmental STS.
Long Abstract:
The body, perception and intuition can help scientific practitioners engage with the environment beyond Cartesian dualism separating mind from body. However, to achieve social transformation, we must reconnect with our collective sorrows and hopes in a world plagued by war and climate disaster. It is necessary to go beyond the constant numbness or the belief that techno-fixes or disciplinary specialists will change what has as its basis the ontology of separation, competition and individualism, characteristic of Colonial Modernity (Quijano, 2001). Therefore decoloniality is a central tenet of this creative intervention. The body’s relationship to the environment has been ruptured through environmental harms, colonialism, and cultural conditioning resulting from Cartesian dualism (Scott 2015; Short 2022; Kowal, Radin, and Reardon 2013). Consequently, webs of relationality with more-than-human worlds are also disrupted. Arts practice can work to mend some of these ruptures. For researchers in science and technology studies (STS), the idea of an environmental imaginary driven by body-/intuition-based epistemologies becomes compelling.
We are interested in several ways that intuition, embodiment and perception may guide environmental inquiry. Tacit knowledges and forms of embodiment are vital to exploring relationships and encounters between global economic cores and broader peripheral zones, as well as inter/intra-actions between peripheral zones. Artistic interventions may be used to map out these encounters and provide possibilities of practice against the hegemony of imperial power relations. Rather than global cultures of institutional science, it is often locally-situated artistic interventions that carry the potential to subvert normative power structures.
For this panel, we seek traditional papers, artworks and other creative interventions to engage with ways of knowing often sidelined in the context of institutional scientific inquiry, namely, the body, intuition, and perception. We invite contributions that examine the role of intuition in creating a more emancipatory vision of a decolonial environmental STS.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Emilie Moberg (Stockholm university)
Long abstract:
Against the backdrop of human-induced climate change and severe biodiversity loss, scholars within feminist STS stress the need for alternative modes of knowledge production processes. The current paper aims to explore how the method of collective biography (Gannon, 2019) could work to make teacher-educators in science education reflect on and transform their teaching practices in order for students to experience encounters with more-than-human worlds as sites for embodied and multi-sensory knowledges (Myers, 2017). The method is designed as a series of three explorative-cooperative-critical-affirmative group meetings with three teacher-educators working within the area of science education at Stockholm University (the authors of the paper). The reflections during the meetings evolve around teaching examples and questions about how we as teacher-educators design and plan for student´s unforeseen encounters with more-than-human worlds as sites for embodied and emotional knowledges. Theoretical concepts will be used as tools to think with in the meetings, for example alienation as used by Tsing (2015) and unknowing as used by Myers (2017). The concepts become a way to re-think and ‘unknow’ higher education teaching practices where non-human species risk becoming objectified and defined from criteria based on human needs, for example in terms of the provision of ecosystem services. The tentative results of the study point to the importance of finding ways as teacher-educators to stage creative teaching practices where more-than-human worlds becomes included as subjective beings while producing alternative environmental imaginaries together with students.
Kate Genevieve Almendra Cremaschi (University of San Martin) Simone Johnson Mona Nasseri (Schumacher College) Cassie Robinson
Long abstract:
This discussion considers long-term, place-based creative practice engagements as modes of ecological communication.
The Ecoimaginaries panel brings together creative collectives, Indigenous artists and cultural workers working with art, ecologies and alternative technology cultures. The focus is on art that grows relations and resilience over long periods of time through work with communities, embodying ancient and emergent cultural practices in ways that are woven with the life of the Land.
Emphasising that technologies, as much as animal ecologies, are expressions of place and specific locals, the panel explores processes, techniques and qualities of reframing and reimagining co-created infrastructures and communications that serve more-than-human ecologies - from seed archives growing protected commons in germplasm, digital embodied networks for community knowledge, and transcultural media art installations that connect with globally migrating birds.
The discussion builds on presentations by artists, technologists involved in the Ecological Imaginaries programme, working to develop a community-driven approach to eco-social change, by which creativity engagements are in service to ecological flourishing. The panel is designed through a community approach to support creative practices and imaginative activism that deeply work with Indigenous perspectives, working for reciprocal relationships with the land and more-than-human beings.
Ulrike Scholtes (Maastricht Institute of Arts)
Short abstract:
How can imaginations and intuitions of thin-skinned, weakly-bounded and attuned bodies provoke social transformation and impact STS research? This performative intervention teaches STS researchers to blur their body boundaries, practice attunement and feel connected.
Long abstract:
In this performative intervention (multimodal guided visualizations), I propose the idea that social and environmental transformation requires a form of embodiment in which bodies are not bounded by that which is contained by the skin. Our current (social) climate asks for a different conceptualization of a body than the individual, such as a “second body” which connects an individual to each and every body on this earth, as proposed by Hildyard (2017). Worlds connect through bodies that are not whole. I propose an imagination of the body of the (STS) researcher as porous, adhering to break the one-body-one-person rule (Boll & Müller 2020) challenged, for instance, by scholars who present bodies and boundaries as leaky, permeable or dissolving (Shildrick 1997, Mol 2002, Hildyard 2017). But how does such a body feel? In this experiment, I present performative imaginations that facilitate blurring boundaries, practicing attunement and feeling connected. Provoking the idea that what social transformation needs is thin-skinned, weakly bounded, and attuned bodies, I end the session by inviting a lively debate about the transformative impact of such embodiments for STS research.
References:
Boll, T., Müller, S.M (2020). Body Boundary Work: Praxeological Thoughts on Personal Corporality. Hum Stud 43, 585–602.
Hildyard, D. (2017). The second body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple. Ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge.
Ester Eriksson (University of Derby)
Short abstract:
This presentation presents an example of how to integrate lived experience as an epistemological inquisitive tool that rejects colonial legacies of academic knowledge production. I examine how my PhD research has been and currently is being shaped by embodied perception and intuitive composition.
Long abstract:
This is the first presentation of a side-project that I am working on alongside my PhD. My PhD research is centred around eco-somatic dance and nature-connectedness in the Anthropocene, and I am developing a framework for integrating subjective embodied experiences in the formulation of trans-disciplinary research inquiries. Challenging both chronocentrism and dualism (including both body–mind and nature-culture), I suggest that what I have coined the subjective "eco-body-story" of the researcher plays an indispensable role not only in metabolising findings, but in formulating research inquiries in the first place. This speaks to Donna Haraway's 'situated knowledges' and provides an applied example of subjectivity as a serious research attitude of importance. I use what I am tentatively terming "mother habitat" or "mother ecology" as a materially and conceptually distinct outset from which a researcher's eco-body-story can be traced and understood to ask uniquely situated questions of value beyond the individual. This presentation engages understandings of the embodied awareness as vital in linking together elements of research that traditionally or institutionally occupy separate disciplines, but necessitate engagement as un-severed, intact interrelated realities. I present this approach as valuable for trans-contextual and trans-disciplinary research. Finally, I consider the implications of lacking awareness of one's eco-body-story (and embodied perception) on personal career and wider research development.
Rosa Prosser (UCL)
Short abstract:
In seeking to develop an embodied understanding of the wind, this paper proposes the methodology of 'sensory ecological ethnography' as a research practice. Ultimately the wind becomes a wind(ow) through which to see (and feel) the ecologies, histories, philosophies and stories of the place.
Long abstract:
If the Pennines are to be described as the backbone of England, then the Helm Wind is the shiver that runs down that spine. The Helm Wind draws significance from its status as the only named wind in Britain and is notorious amongst those who live within its domain.
"For the month of April 2023, I attempted to touch this wind.
The idea came from a curiosity and desire to explore the wind on film – in this visual medium, we have no way of knowing that the wind is present unless it interacts with something on screen. Production month was April, and this process of returning almost every day to the site of the Helm – initially seeking to capture it on camera; increasingly moving towards filming with it – allowed me to develop a methodology extending beyond the documentary touching the wind. I use the space of this paper to creatively present this methodology, making moves towards what I term a “sensory ecological ethnography” of the wind."
The paper tangles a history and philosophy of the Helm Wind with the embodied experiences from the author/artist filming (with) the wind and gathered conversations with local residents about their embodied experiences from dwelling in the wind. Audio-visual elements are weaved throughout giving a space for embodied and marginalised knowledge about the wind that bypasses language.
Jenny Staff (Freelance National Gallery)
Long abstract:
Jenny Staff explores the impact of walking on physical, spiritual and mental well-being, through its meditative qualities. Looking at the physiological effect and impact of the physical and metaphorical journey and processing that happens through prolonged steady movement. Through her process-based practice she works with the interconnection of the internal and external environments.
‘Invisible to Visible’, is the re-walking of a solo pilgrimage, at a critical point in her life. Jenny collected the data of physical steps using a pedometer as a way to document and frame this walk. Seven women walk silently together drawing a huge circle in chalk to complete the 19,273 steps of the original pilgrimage. Delineating a circle, writ large, layer upon layer, step after step, building a space, sound and line, barefoot stepping, walking together - no leaders, a somatic, silent space to be together and separate, safe - no fear of where to go. - but be in the repetitious act of walking. Creating a pause, a space in time, physically, mentally and spiritually, the calm repetition, to connect to land, to self, to spirit, to people, a space of possibility to connect with Tacit information, bringing geographies together, making them visible, in an ephemeral, transient reclamation of space and time. On either side of the walk were two poems, passed to Jenny by her granny, which explore courage, hope and self-awareness, to read line by line in Dutch and English, again connecting one landscape to another through a common vision.
Matt Barlow
Long abstract:
The history of Kochi is best told through its relationship with water. This monsoonal city, on the southwest coast of India, was once a thriving fishing village and trading port. The harbor that the city is built around was created from the floods of 1341, which annihilated the ancient and now semi-mythic trading city of Muziris. Then, through several colonial inquests between the 15th and 19th centuries, relationships with water were changed as roads and railways were constructed to facilitated the flow of commerce, and the backwaters were filled with wastes. In August 2018, while I was conducting ethnographic research in Kochi, the city was inundated with another historic flood, one that left one third of the state of Kerala under water. Just a few months later, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale--the largest arts festival in South Asia--opened to the public. Many participating artists took the opportunity to engage with water and the coloniality of the infrastructures built to manage it in the city. In this multimedia presentation, I will reflect on the role of art and ethnographic environmental methods in remembering water, and its infinite returns, in this postcolonial port city.
Anna Walker (Plymouth University)
Long abstract:
For this paper and video presentation, I will be discussing the video, ‘We are the granddaughters of those who didn't burn’ (2022), which emerged in response to a lecture given by Donna Haraway, at Yale University in 2017. Compiled from a culmination of written accounts, and oral stories passed down through the author/artist’s family, the video traces the journey of the Celtic wise woman, known as The Cailleach, calling attention to the entangled historical and processual aspects of knowing and being woman.
The video, and thus this paper explores the archetype of the crone, and her various guises, to redeem her as a positive feminist symbol of aging and transformation. The Cailleach, a dynamic force and a continuing presence in Irish and Scottish culture, exemplifies the psychodynamic process of change and transmutation. In the video, she symbolises a feminist reframing of Irish culture and a reclaiming of the demonised otherworld female of Irish tradition.
Opportunistic, contingent, The Cailleach is worlding through myth and through feminist principles. Whether Medusa, Hecate, The Cailleach, Crone, Hag, or Witch, this presentation liberates HER from the shadows, from the dark undergrowth and subterranean depths to which SHE has been relegated. Haraway stresses the importance of listening to the figures that exist in de-territorialised spaces, those that occupy a liminal place on the borders of society for it is their otherness that brings an urgent and necessary complexity to understanding ourselves globally, culturally, and individually. (2016, 130).
Link: https://vimeo.com/589741306 (2021-2022).
Ashley Snook
Short abstract:
This studio-based dissertation project emerges from engagements with concepts of animality, biophilia, and the Chthulucene. These concepts form central research topics, contributing to a framework that webs together connections between human and nonhuman relationality and environmental remediation.
Long abstract:
This studio-based dissertation project emerges from my engagement with the concepts of animality, biophilia, and the Chthulucene. These concepts form central research topics amongst a host of supporting subthemes, contributing to a framework that webs together connections between human and nonhuman relationality and environmental remediation. I interrogate and problematize human-centric perspectives and hegemonic forces that encourage distance from animality and arguably enable environmental degradation. My work thus challenges ongoing legacies of colonialism that promote oppression and destruction. The written component of this project is part of an interdisciplinary thesis that includes artworks presented at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery from July 4 to July 30, 2022, in an exhibition entitled NODES: Animality and Kinship. The overarching themes of animality, biophilia, and the Chthulucene are mirrored in the writing and in the artworks, which were shown in a three-gallery presentation deploying video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Together, the writing and the body of art proceed from my positionality within our complex geological times where, I argue, the need to recognize animality and multispecies relationality is of primary urgency in advocating for the preservation of connections amongst human and nonhuman species. As a whole, this dissertation project considers how animality, both as a subject and a framework, can work towards mending socio-cultural relationships and support environmental remediation. The written project is composed of three chapters and a conclusion, followed by a dossier documenting the exhibition and an appendix of related works and projects I created during my doctoral studies.
Ayasha Guerin (University of California, Los Angeles)
Short abstract:
"Learning in the Liberated Planet Studio" is a performance lecture to share the research of the Pacific-based movement and sounding research studio. I'll share the somatic methodologies participants developed together in Vancouver and Los Angeles to advance socio-ecological inquiry.
Long abstract:
The Liberated Planet Studio (LPS) is a roaming invitation to gather artists, activists and academic collaborators into somatic inquiry and collective dialogue about our common inheritances: colonialism and climate change. The studio was founded by Dr. Ayasha Guerin, in January, 2023 at the Dance Centre, in Vancouver, Canada with the support of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the studio was open for drop-in collaborations and open movement, co-reading groups and discussions. Texts and music, maps and animal studies were shared as collective prompts. A Saturday workshop series invited fourteen artists, academics and environmental activists to lead public workshops, responding to the nature and climate emergencies and exploring the prompt of sharing liberatory and restorative practices. LPS invites new modes of working that are more attentive to inter-dependencies between human and non-human bodies to support research at the intersections of environmental and social exploitation, human and animal experience and intercultural planetary struggles for liberation from the extractive logics of colonial capitalism. By platforming historically marginalized workshop leaders and participants, LPS seeks to widen and diversify the field of environmental studies and the somatic arts. Movement practices can help us attend to our planet’s ecological catastrophes while we relearn how to relate, communicate, and share space safely. After an institutional move to UCLA, The Liberated Planet Studio will gather scholars, artists and activists in Los Angeles in Spring 2023, so this presentation will summarize the through-lines and changes of the studio's work in both contexts.