Description

Our event will be a playful, hands-on workshop in which we will showcase experimental methods that we have used in a 2022-26 research project on nuclear decommissioning, socioecological futures, and landscapes (https://www.mimesis-in-action.org). Our place-based methods in this project were designed to provoke publics in areas of nuclear decommissioning to think imaginatively about potential futures post-decommissioning. For PeopleFest, we invite visitors to our event to experiment with ‘eco-telling’ using so-called ‘character cards’. The goal is to share a story about a (human or non-human) character living in a specific place a hundred years from now. The event mimics what we did at workshops in the field but we will adapt our character cards to make them meaningful in a more general Scottish context. Offering a drop-in event, we encourage visitors to browse informative graphic panels and futuring maps designed at our field workshops (we will focus on two areas from our research project, Caithness in Scotland and West Cumbria in England) before getting to work in pairs or small groups to engage in eco-telling. At set moments, one of the organizers will launch into a short verbal explanation of our project methodology and the insights it brought us at workshops in our fieldsites. Providing a space for info-cum-experimentation, our goal is to convey how Anthropology adopts a holistic perspective on studying social phenomena through time, making spatial and temporal connections whilst paying attention to specific contexts, and without shying away from an interventionist stance.