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- Convenor:
-
Luisa Cortesi
(International Institute of Social Studies)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-08A20
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
The operation of intersecting and multiplying knowledge/s and ecology/ies is a provocation aimed at thinking about and with ways of understanding and systematizing but also limiting and delimiting both nature and knowledge.
Long Abstract:
Ecologies and Knowledges, considered separate entities, hold more in common than is commonly held. At the same time objects and ways of thinking about them at different meta levels, both nature and knowledge are processes of classification and validation, understanding and systematizing, but also of disbarring, ostracizing, and failing. How do these two conceptual devices operate individually and vis-à-vis each other? What are the overlaps and potentials for inversion? For example, how is nature framed and understood when we talk about knowing it? And vice versa, which casts and matrixes does ecological thinking enable in the concept of knowledge?
Combine knowledge(s) and ecology/ies, and one obtains conceptual intersections and subsections as well as multiplications and powers of. Knowledge is itself an ecology, and ecology as well as nature are specific knowledges. So, which interdependencies of relationships and relationships of interdependence may their articulations open possibilities for? Or, which disruption of chains or chains of disruption do their different junctures bring about? For example, what happens if we focus on the complexities and ambiguities of what we, broadly intended, are as ecological knowers?
This proposal of epistemological provocations embraces both their ludic potential and the ripples of weighty consequences. This panel is welcoming any (and encouraging creative) presentation forms.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This proposal challenges Western dualities of Nature and Culture by focusing on the understanding and practice of dreaming in an indigenous family at Lake Icalma in southern Chile. It reveals how dreams are part of a system of communication between humans and other-than-humans.
Paper long abstract:
The research takes the form of a film, in between ethnographic research and experimental multimodal practice, bringing together content and form. The research inhabits the agential continuities and communication between beings in the territory: through specific knowledge of dreams interpretation, Belisario, the protagonist, accesses a system of communication between his spirit and the spirits that co-inhabit the territory: the spirit of the lake, of the deceased, among others. While sleeping, his spirit can travel around meeting the other spirits, whilst his body stays in bed. In a world where every material entity has a spiritual 'double', dreaming serves as a technology of communication and relation, of reciprocity and cohabitation, that challenges the anthropocentric Western way of being in the world and the prevalent nature/culture divides.
Paper short abstract:
There is a need to explore how relational thinking and being can inform and support deliberate transformations toward sustainability. Based on learning experiences across geographies, we advance a handful of qualities that can act as central pillars for nurturing liveable relationalities.
Paper long abstract:
Relations and relationalities have become central theoretical framings for much transformations research due to their ability to inquire into non-deterministic and non-linear change processes and to open up hegemonic accounts of transformation. Much of this work draws on systems thinking, feminist theory and indigenous onto-epistemologies. While most research is focusing on understanding and characterizing transformations relationally, there is a need to explore how relational thinking and being can inform and support deliberate transformations toward sustainability. In this article, we define deliberate transformations toward sustainability as radical changes in societal structures, relations and logics that uproot exploitative and discriminatory modes of world-making and replace them with liveable and regenerative worlds grounded in equity, dignity and compassion. When perceived of as merely a mechanism of being in relation, relationality says little about the outcomes for sustainability. Only when we ground relationality in an ethos of care can we use relationality as a lens and compass for supporting transformative change. We intertwine our reflections with experiences from collaborations in Mexico, Alaska and Ghana, drawing on insights from feminist and Indigenous thinking and being. Learning from these collaborations, we advance a handful of qualities that can act as central pillars for qualifying liveable relationalities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically examines the notion of ‘regime shifts’ in systems ecology by engaging with local ways of understanding, anticipating, and experiencing socioecological collapse. It draws on interviews about threats and thresholds with people living near mining sites in vulnerable ecosystems.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of research on ecosystem stability, the trickiest components to measure are those that deal with thresholds or ‘regime shifts,’ namely the points at which a particular ecosystem is no longer able to recover from or cope with various types of disturbances or perturbations, what ecologists refer to as latitude and tolerance, respectively. The main reason for this is that in order for ecologists to accurately measure the latitude and tolerance of an ecosystem, that ecosystem would have to have already collapsed (or undergone a regime shift).
This paper examines alternative ways of theorizing, anticipating, and responding to socioecological collapse, drawing on feminist and Indigenous epistemologies to better understand both the hierarchies of knowledge that underlie dominant theories and methods in systems ecology and rendering explicit the inherent entanglements of being, knowing, and doing. Through an analysis of interviews with people living around large-scale mining sites in vulnerable ecosystems, it builds on ecological approaches to thresholds and regime shifts by offering a necessary corrective to these models’ (and modelers’) often blinkered focus on top-down, “objective” data. In doing so, the paper centers new types and sources of data in both academic and policy debates about ecosystemic resilience and stability – folklore, oral history, gossip, etc. Such an approach emphasizes the importance of understanding ecological perturbations – and the knowledge we rely on to make sense of them – as always already political.
Paper short abstract:
Within the intertwined projects of preservation and accumulation which (re)produce the natural history museum’s collection, an ecology emerges. This paper proposes thinking with multiple forms of decay as actors that challenge normative ideas of ecology and knowledge within the collections.
Paper long abstract:
Within the natural history museum, specimen collections are imagined to embody an economic asset, an ontological representation, and a future knowledge potential. These meanings and materials must be continually re-produced through preservation efforts, or else succumb to decay. Thus, institutional actors’ and infrastructural responses to rot are revealing, not just in ascertaining the stakes of institutional preservation, but in laying bare specimens’ ongoing ontological and relational situatedness. This paper seeks to integrate experience from material care of collections and the poetics of relation-building with dead nonhuman beings, in order to push the bounds of questions asked of “specimens” and those who work with them. By refusing to situate myself within only one way of knowing and relating to specimens, I draw on anti-colonial, feminist STS and queer theory in conjunction with direct experience at the Smithsonian Herbarium, Museum für Naturkunde, and Yale Peabody Museum in order to express felt ecologies of being-with collections that are in uneasy relation to "scientific" knowledge.
This paper considers how preservation research and maintenance projects undergird institutionally situated relationships with nonhuman specimens, while suggesting that their political dimensions might reveal rot as a “life-affirming process” in the context of museums’ deathly nature (Jones and Lyons, 2021). In this context, rot can be seen as a material-ontological process which has the potential to evade and frustrate colonial processes of knowledge accumulation—giving way to new ecologies of relation.
Paper short abstract:
Invasive Alien Species are considered one of the biggest threats to biodiversity loss today, yet the foundational definitions, categorizations and underlying concepts of nature and culture are heavily contested. Social-scientific critiques of nature-culture dualisms further complicate them.
Paper long abstract:
The concept of invasive alien species constitutes an ecological way of problematizing some organisms novel to ecosystems and their interactions with local species. To become intelligible as a problem, species causing harm to ecosystems are dependent on a number of technoscientific categories, like clearly defined ecosystems or species being “native” and “foreign”, but also explicitly normative and aesthetic judgements about “good” and “bad” forms of nature. The production of knowledge on and the formal and informal management of species constellations enacts those categories and judgements materially, producing natures, cultures, and ecologies as they go along.
Social scientists, especially feminist and post/anti-colonial scholars, have produced valuable insights into and critiques of nature-culture dualisms. The gendered and racialized relations of power, (re)produced and maintained in the enactments of nature and culture, fundamentally question the categories produced in technoscientific ways of knowing and doing nature(s).
Taking this critique seriously poses several question: What are biological invasions beyond dualistic understanding of nature and culture? What kind of relations to ecosystems and biodiversity do we want to foster, when looking at species constellations? How do we best live and die within the entanglements we have? In my talk, I will sketch out possibilities and ideas, based on my fieldwork on invasive species management.