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- Convenors:
-
Michelle Geraerts
(University of Amsterdam, Worlds of Lithium ERC)
Corinne Lamain (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Shivani Kaul (University of Amsterdam)
Julien-François Gerber (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Yukari Sekine
Ana Victoria Portocarrero (KIT Royal Tropical Institute)
Daniela Calmon (International Institute of Social Studies)
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- Discussants:
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Oona Morrow
(Wageningen University)
Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
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 contributions:
Session 1Corinne Lamain (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Anke de Vrieze (Centre for Unusual Collaborations)
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.
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.
Eda Cakmakci (Harvard University)
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.
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.
Wendy Harcourt (ISSEUR)
Short abstract:
taking time to care looks at stories of care proposing how homo narrans can counter the dominant narrative of homoeconomicus
Long abstract:
My paper proposes that feminist political ecology (FPE) in theory and practice challenges the dispossession and devaluing of life that has led to the current unsustainable lifeworld. In seeking to be homo narrans, ie to narrate ourselves differently from homo economicus, the paper explores how we can unlearn the dominant fearful narrative of capitalist modernity and and learn to tell, and live, stories of equality, hope, freedom and justice that counter those of greed, despair and destruction. I argue that FPE builds narratives of restorative and transformative justice with the aim of living and being ‘otherwise’: fostering reciprocity, community and care. My interest is in how different narratives of care, emerging from activist movement responses to Covid and practices of Earthcare are creating intellectual and political space for alternative and pluriversal possibilities of ‘being in relation’. I argue that activists and scholars working in degrowth, decolonial and ecofeminist traditions are showing why we need to take the time to care if we are to build relations of care that sustain ecosystems and human and more-than-human living worlds if we are to move towards repair, amplifying solidarity rather than reproducing mastery.
Mik Abel Hespe van den Brink (University of Stavanger)
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.
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 goal of these future workshops was to invite citizens who are interested in urban agriculture to think about the current context for urban agriculture in Stavanger and how this context may be further developed in a network setting.
This thesis delves into the realm of urban agriculture, exploring its potential amidst challenges and opportunities. The introduction elucidates the concept, addressing obstacles and prospects for its advancement, juxtaposing conventional agriculture and urban agriculture as part of building a social movement. The literature review examines degrowth as a framework to bridge the metabolic rift, advocating for localised economies as a means to enact degrowth, with urban agriculture emerging as a viable strategy for localised economic activity. The theory chapter delves deeper into urban agriculture's role in ameliorating societal metabolic rifts, advocating for action research as a suitable methodology for exploring its developmental possibilities, alongside the significance of envisioning utopias in future workshops.
As of now, I have completed only one workshop, with two more remaining. Nevertheless, the level of enthusiasm for engaging in the action research has exceeded expectations, with 21 participants attending the last workshop. The aim is to initiate projects through this action research that foster enduring collaborations, enabling more individuals to cultivate their own food locally.
Sharmistha Mallick (Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi)
Long abstract:
This paper explores the changing notions of food and nutrition patterns and consumption culture in the two districts of Coastal regions of eastern Indian state, Odisha. This will explore how food, nutrition and ecology play a crucial role in people’s health (Shetty 2006; Gopalan 2013; Majumder 2016). It examines the close interlinkage between food and nutrition, how changing the nature of food and nutrition is affecting people’s health in Odisha. Through the selective examination of use of grains and food habits, it will also look into consumption patterns in food and how they have changed through the generations. For example, "Panta bhat" (fermented rice), was considered as a good sustainable food for the farmers, now it is seen as Carbs and with negative light. It will examine the nature and kinds of health issues/diseases among the people due to lack of diet, food and nutrition and the shifts in it in 50 years of time. The paper argues how food sociology can help to conceptualise the connections between individual food habits and wider social patterns to explore why we eat the way we do and the changing dietary and food patterns over the generations. It will also explore the social context in which food is produced, distributed, consumed and disposed (Delormier, T., Frohlich, K. L., & Potvin, L. 2009). It will argue that food habits are not universal, natural or inevitable; they are social constructions, and significant variations exist. The paper argues what influence do tradition, cultural values and belief systems have on food habits in a particular region, social group? How do various forms of social organisation and social institutions affect the production, distribution and consumption of food and nutrition?