Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how NatureCulture learning practices at Floating (University) Berlin unsettle anthropocentric, visual-centric epistemologies and cultivate alternative more-than-human sensibilities, opening new pathways for ecological relations and knowing.

Presentation long abstract

“Enacting Sensibility“ examines how learning practices that move beyond the nature-culture divide configure multisensorial political ecologies. Drawing on feminist and ecological pedagogies, sensibility here foregrounds embodiment, affect, attunement and care, over disembodied, purely cognitive modes of knowledge transmission. This aligns with Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing”, van Dooren et al.’s “arts of attentiveness” and Nancy Tuana’s articulation of an “anthropocenean sensibility”, all of which invite practices that trouble dominant epistemologies.

The paper analyzes how NatureCulture learning cultivates ecosomatic practices, such as becoming-animal, becoming-soil, or becoming-water that aim to attune participants to more-than-human beings and planetary processes. These practices probe how anthropocentric forms of sensing, particularly the visual primacy embedded in Western epistemologies, are unsettled and how alternative more-than-human sensibilities emerge, asking: How are sensorial engagements rendered pedagogical and how do they open pathways toward new ecological relations and modes of knowing?

The research is situated at the NatureCulture Learning Site Floating (University) Berlin and draws on ethnographic methods tracing specific learning formats developed within the “Climate Care Festival“. Although these formats remained within the realm of human activities, they generated sensorially complex encounters that challenged anthropocentric frames, revealed tensions inherent in “sensing otherwise” and fostered awareness of how knowledge, power and environments are produced and contested through the full sensorium.