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- Convenors:
-
Aadita Chaudhury
(York University)
Rita Valencia (CIESAS Sureste)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-11A33
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
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 papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Ecoimaginaries brings together creative and cultural collectives working with art, ecologies and alternative technologies. The focus is on practice growing relations and resilience over long periods of time through work with communities: embodying creative practices woven with the life of the Land.
Paper 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.
Paper 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.
Paper 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.