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- Convenors:
-
Evelien de Hoop
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Sjamme van de Voort (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Erik van der Vleuten (Eindhoven University of Technology)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores ways in which enquiries into pasts (histories, memories, heritage etc.) may go hand in hand with rethinking and redoing presents and futures in research settings that approach knowledge production as a situated intervention (cf. Zuiderent-Jerak 2015).
Long Abstract:
This Combined Open Panel has two intertwined points of departure to its conception of (transdisciplinary/co-created/intervention-based) academic work seeking to enact and study change in the world. First, we work with the idea that pasts (as they are experienced, remembered, preserved, studied etc.) play a key role in the way presents are lived and understood and the way futures are imagined and worked towards. Second, we take inspiration from the notion of Situated Intervention (cf Zuiderent-Jerak 2015), which proposes a form of knowledge production that is neither engaged (i.e. the scholar-consultant, subservient to a commissioner’s ambitions) nor distanced (i.e. ‘objective’, ivory-tower), but which instead studies the knowledges, worlds and normativities that emerge from experimenting with co-productionist ways of doing and knowing in practice. Bringing these two points of departure together in the context of burgeoning “transformation” interests gives rise to an exploration of ways in which enquiries into pasts may go hand in hand with rethinking and redoing presents and futures in transdisciplinary research settings.
In light of this broadly formulated enquiry, we welcome contributions that engage with one or more of the following themes:
Methods and tools in research endeavors that characterize themselves as co-productionist, transdisciplinary, citizen science-driven, etc. that engage with temporalities across and beyond past, present and future
Conceptual innovation that support the above-formulated enquiry, situated either in research enquiries primarily focused on pasts and the past in the present (i.e. history, memory studies, heritage studies etc.) or in research enquiries dealing with presents and futures (i.e. research on societal/socio-ecological transitions and transformations, sustainability studies, etc.)
…
This Combined Open Panel is open to a wide array of formats, which include the options listed on the conference call website, but we are also open to alternatives to those listed.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Sjamme van de Voort (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Evelien de Hoop (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Erik van der Vleuten (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Long abstract:
“‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Over the last decades, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological questions regarding the relationship between the past, present and future have risen in fields that would previously focus primarily on just a single of these temporal dimensions. Fields such as memory studies, heritage studies, applied history, and a re-emergent oral history focused on environmental narratives of the Anthropocene, each seek a connection between these temporal dimensions in attempts to connect studies of the past to issues of the present and future. (Olick, Sierp, & Wüstenberg, 2023; Harrison, Dias & Kristiansen, 2023; Sloan & Cave, 2022)
However, despite valuable contributions to academic and public discourse, disconnects persist between the aspirations outlined in the theoretical frameworks of these incipient disciplines, and the methodological practices that they bring about. (van de Voort, 2021)
This paper comes from the methodological engine room of the trans-disciplinary project Soy Stories - which investigates connected histories of sustainability challenges associated with large-scale soy cultivation in Brazil and soy-based intensive animal farming in the Netherlands. Furthermore, Soy Stories investigates how historical knowledge may contribute to more just and connected sustainable future imaginaries.
By addressing conceptual, theoretical and methodological gaps arising from these fields of study, this paper will seek to contribute to approaches that will allow transformative projects - such as Soy Stories - to perform situated interventions (Zuiderent-Jerak 2015) in projects connecting past, present and future imaginaries.
Miriam Hamel (Bauhaus University Weimar) Claire Waffel (Bauhaus-University, Weimar)
Long abstract:
In view of current global crises and rising inequalities, many sites have come under heightened pressure to develop ideas for a more just and liveable future. Cities and coastal sites will increasingly be affected by climate change as ecological, social and housing challenges come to a head in multiple ways. Both sites are habitats where linear projections of the future as a continuation of the present no longer are viable. Instead, we need methods that deal flexibly and openly with uncertainty, understand existing unexplored potentials as a resource and, simultaneously, involve a variety of people in change processes in order to create acceptance for and identification with the new. Our contribution focuses on the potential of artistic strategies to participate in spatial imaginaries of the future of these two sites. Taking up processes of urban development and coastal defence in Cologne (Germany) and Fairbourne (Wales), we investigate the significance and function of artistic research in creating translations of the future that appeal to our senses and therefore become imaginable. Collaging narratives, spaces and temporalities, creating cuts and ruptures in imagined and physical space as well as highlighting different perspectives and scales, linear narratives that can act as closures of space (Massey, 2005) are interrupted and opened up again. This way it becomes possible to sketch out and anticipate future scenarios that are already unravelling, in small steps, collaboratively. Based on our different methodologies, we aim to make proposals for a situated, process-oriented and collaborative form of spatial futures.
Kıvılcım Zafer Teoman (Galatasaray University)
Long abstract:
With a long-term ethnographic approach, this study focuses on mapping the interconnected relationships formed through social media platforms in the creation and shaping of collective and individual memories among the younger demographic in Turkey. Recognizing social media as spaces for self-expression and the development of social ties, the study explores how these digital interactions are intertwined with personal aspects of life, intricately influenced by daily communication. This research centers on the dynamics of social media platforms, acknowledging them as digital landscapes where young people engage in self-expression and the cultivation of social connections. It also investigates the interplay between online and offline relations, aiming to recall memories and facilitate the formation of new experiences within the context of shaping and perpetuating social frames of reference.
Over a span of three years and involving forty university students, this approach employs a diverse array of methods, encompassing both online and offline in-depth interviews, long-term field observations, analyses of social media profiles, and solicitation of visual materials from participants. The primary objective of this approach is to construct a multifaceted map that integrates both visual and textual components to gain insights into how young individuals' engagement with social media intricately intertwines with their broader social perspective. It also places emphasis on exploring the intersection of these digital spaces with the concept of memory by challenging the traditional separation of online and offline realms, delving into the interdependence that characterizes these spaces, aiming to dismantle cultural layers and complex relationships.
Gijs ten Berge (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven)
Long abstract:
In this presentation of an academic paper, ‘mnemonic imagination’ is proposed as a concept that sheds light on the role of (collective) memory in sustainability transitions. Through a panel discussion, the insights coming forward from the historical inquiry of the academic paper will be translated to a transdisciplinary research context.
Mnemonic imagination is a concept that is based on the notion that the imagination of the future and memorization are constituted by the same processes of reconstruction. In their interaction, memory and imagination synthesize past, present and future producing new perceptions of the past and new meanings on a variety of scales. Memory, then, is potentially transformative. Based on memories of the past, human behaviour is transformed in the present because humans consider this transformed behaviour to better prepare them for what they think will happen in the future.
In sustainability transitions literature, socio-technical imagination is considered a social practice that is part of socio-technical transitions. Through the adoption of technologies, transition actors imagine new societal forms that meet their needs in a better way. However, the role of memorization in socio-technical imagination has been rarely accounted for. In this contribution of 45 minutes, the results of the historical research to the role of mnemonic imagination in the energy transition to gas and electricity in the Dutch household are brought forward. A discussion on the translation of the acquired insights to a transdisciplinary research on transitions in the present will be facilitated.
Tom Hawxwell (HafenCity University)
Long abstract:
Urban mobility systems have become highly contested spaces. The locked-in arrangements of urban automobility that are the product of car-centric urban development in the 20th century are increasingly under pressure to change in light of the many ambitions for the future of urban areas that are often at odds with the car’s hegemonic status. The research builds on an emerging perspective in transformation-oriented research that places processes of destabilisation at the centre of investigations into socio-technical change. Focusing on the city of Hamburg as a case study, the research draws on the perspectives of individuals involved in the urban mobility governance arrangements as observers or (former) practitioners to identify turning points, mounting pressure fronts and shifts in the incumbent responses over time. Five development phases are identified characterised by shifts in the incumbent responses to mounting pressures. Despite a clear shift away from the unfettered expansion of the car-based transport system in the late 1970s, the extent to which socio-technical destabilisation has occurred is unclear. There has been a growing coalition of actors that have been challenging the prevailing car-centric arrangements for some decades. Furthermore, some key changes in the underlying logics that underpin car-based automobility can be identified. However, the incumbent responses to the mounting pressures demonstrate limited commitment to challenge the privileged position of the car in the mobility system and recent shifts could indicate the emergence of new and more entrenched lock-ins.
Simon Sackers (Leiden University)
Long abstract:
During my four months of ethnographic field work in Tajikistan (2023/2024) I studied how the looming transformation of Tajikistan’s electricity infrastructure is approached by different actors connected through one grid. My research relates to temporalities, as in my case the materiality and experience of ‘the past’ acts as moral conspirator against future transformations. While the past promise for public provisioning of hydroelectricity lives on in the practices and expectations of residents, different planners and NGO workers try to responsabilize the commons to free up future capacity for ‘green’ export. On the one hand, especially rural residents who face limits in winter demand electricity to stay a cheap public good. Through state promises of “energy independence” and “the palace of light”, residents negotiate citizenship. On the other hand, international actors and NGOs push for responsibilisation of electricity to enhance sustainability. In a paradigm of future climate resilience, a transmission line is built to export “green electricity” from Tajikistan to Pakistan. What everyone including the president can easily agree on is the ultimate failure of the bankrupt state electricity company Barqi Tojik, which fails to meet both the demands of consumers and of its donors. In this panel, I plan to present my preliminary research results.
Agata Bisping (AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow)
Long abstract:
Wesoła is a space in the heart of Kraków consisting of 10 hectares of green land and 14 buildings that used to serve as the municipal hospitals. It is a dead place at the moment - no nearby inhabitants, no public representation, with psychiatric wards patients and dog walkers as primary stakeholders. And the city that really struggles to justify the amount of money spent to buy this area.
Wesoła was bought back in 2019 and only now is Krakow looking for options and purpose for this area. Here is the past, present and future in the making – as we deal with the buildings from the 19th Century in the middle of a modern city, whose ambition is to create a district that will be both future proof, yet engaging citizens today.
In my research I try to reveal - if and how FST can encourage the residents to design the future of the district, how it can be implemented. How do the residents imagine Wesoła’s functioning and shaping in 10 to 15 years, or maybe in 50? I will show the results of participatory workshops carried out as part of the designed FST process, in which participants in 7 different age and competence groups (children, teenagers, adults, seniors, artists/designers, expats, non-human personas), design a future for this district.
Based on the research by design results and autoetnography, I will illustrate the process and results after the first round of research.