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- Convenors:
-
Michelle Geraerts
(University of Amsterdam, Worlds of Lithium ERC)
Corinne Lamain (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Shivani Kaul (University of Amsterdam)
Yukari Sekine
Ana Victoria Portocarrero (KIT Royal Tropical Institute)
Daniela Calmon (International Institute of Social Studies)
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- Discussants:
-
Oona Morrow
(Wageningen University)
Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-15A16
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
Productivist university spaces promoting fast science approaches generate questionable research ethics. How might scholars working on planetary questions and degrowth slow down or demobilize their science in times of entangled racialized, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and anthropocentric emergencies?
Long Abstract:
As climate change accelerates, ecological economists, feminist economists, and economic anthropologists have amplified degrowth scholarship and put it on the scientific agenda. They argue the drive for perpetual growth organizes the extractivist global economy, precipitates ecological breakdown, and call for a different approach to sustainable ‘transitions’ (Hickel et al 2022). Scientifically, they urge for more research on ‘post-growth modes of living.’
STS scholars too increasingly observe the frictions between growth of the one-world world (Law 2015) and the flourishing of multiple modes of living as the pluriverse (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, Kothari et al 2019). But they flag the ontological politics of conducting degrowth research with methods that repeat modernist binaries (Demmer and Hummel 2017), and observe that ethnographic tools might multiply worlds rather than reduce them under a new universal of degrowth (Kaul et al 2022).
STS-informed collectives also draw from Black Radical and psychoanalytic practices to reflect on how the tightening interdependence of science and industry continues to grip degrowth activists and academics (EmboDegrowth Lab 2021). One neoliberal response to complex unfolding sociopolitical catastrophes has been to mobilize scientific knowledge-making for industrial innovation towards targeted 'solutions’. The resulting productivist university spaces - with short-term project funding, multiple publication targets, and fast science approaches (Stengers 2018) - generate questionable research ethics that also contribute to academic workers’ personal experiences of alienation.
How might researchers working on planetary questions slow down or demobilize their science in a time of entangled racialized, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and anthropocentric emergencies? Should they? How might degrowth scholar-practitioners enact a world of many worlds with their scientific practices? In which languages? What might post-growth science taste like, sound like? In this Combined Format Open Panel, through embodied exercises and shared conversations, we collectively query the relationship between growth, degrowth, fast science, and inter-personal transformation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Fasten your seat belts and get ready for an interplanetary journey! In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore what life is like on different disciplinary planets. We’ll adopt an explorative mindset, practice listening skills and report back to the home planet about our discoveries.
Paper long abstract:
Fasten your seat belts and get ready for an interplanetary journey! In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore what life is like on different disciplinary planets. We’ll adopt an explorative mindset, practice listening skills and report back to the home planet about our discoveries
Activities
Using the metaphor of planets, this workshop aims to explore what’s needed to cross disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines can be compared to planets, each with their own language, culture, practices, beliefs, assumptions, norms and values. Becoming aware of differences as well as similarities between ‘planets’ will enable us to better understand the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary collaborations.
We’ll explore mindsets as well as competences needed for the space journey and experience the power of metaphors and creative methods in inter- and transdisciplinary learning. By utilizing Deep Listening and Empathy Map techniques, you will
develop a heightened awareness of your listening skills, allowing you to better understand the needs and perspectives of those around you.
Next to letting participants experience our workshop we will share key lessons learnt from our own learning journey setting up an interdisciplinary training for early- and mid-career researchers.
This activity is grounded in the framework for interdisciplinary competences developed by the UU, and part of the Spark learning journey in interdisciplinary competences offered by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about the potentials of ethnographic research and writing for revealing peripheral, subordinated and embodied knowledge practices and making these knowledge practices relevant to the debates on industry-led Science in the very locales where large scale projects are materialized.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic writing even though does not have a claim on scientific knowledge production, has the capacity to produce knowledge that often challenges the premises of macro-scale, highly funded projects conducted in the name of Science. With the potential of revealing and learning from peripheral, subordinated knowledge practices, ethnographic research and writing makes these knowledge practices relevant, and central to the contemporary debates on political ecology. In conversation with these debates, I would like to provide a few cases from my ethnographic research in the region of Antalya, which became a major agricultural hub on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey as a result of a regional development project. Since industrial tomato production is introduced to the region, there is a constant contradiction between high praises for industry-led science (based on concepts of efficiency, productivity, improvement, standardization) and the recognition that it is the embodied skills and local knowledge practices that pre-dates the tomato cultivation in the region that make tomatoes grow.
Paper short abstract:
This thesis, part of an internship at Stavanger Municipality, employs Participatory Action Research (PAR) via three future workshops. It explores urban agriculture's potential, addressing challenges, and prospects, advocating for local economies and degrowth.
Paper long abstract:
This Master Thesis is written as part of an internship at the municipality of Stavanger, and it involves a Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the shape of three future workshops that were organised in January, March and April 2024. The Thesis discusses how a metabolic rift in Stavanger constituted by industrial agriculture may be overcome through a process of degrowth. The process of degrowth in this respect involves empowering the local people of Stavanger to get involved with urban agriculture and to see how the future workshops may help with both envisioning utopias, building a network and concretizing where the people in the network may start to further establish Urban Agriculture (UA) within the city. It concludes that the difficulties experienced by the participants are compatible with the theory on metabolic rift as well as that the visions of utopia are in line with a more localised degrowth future where common ownership of resources and land plays a more major role.