- Convenors:
-
Darcy Alexandra
(University of Bern)
Michaela Schäuble (University of Bern)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Circumventing the debilitating, apocalyptic 'Game Over' climate scenario, this panel examines nuanced engagements with waterways, landscapes and critters where people and other living beings are 'imagining otherwise.' Examples of multi-modal and interdisciplinary research are foregrounded.
Long Abstract:
To circumvent the debilitating, apocalyptic 'Game Over' climate scenario, scholars argue for the importance of developing nuanced engagements with sites and practices where people and other living beings are 'imagining otherwise' (Dillon 2012; Gumbs 2020; Povinelli 2016). These engagements can be found at the borders of extractive capitalism (Tsing 2015; Gomez-Barris 2017), and in trans-species relations of attention and care (Haraway 2016). In particular, this panel sets its sight on practices that take the future as a horizon of possibility and make ecological connections across social and natural sciences, humanities and the arts. We are particularly interested in practices of engagement by/with environmental scientists, citizen scientists, and/or community actors employing diverse technologies to restore wildlife corridors and revitalise threatened waterways and watersheds, for example. Given that human exceptionalism and the mono-perspectivism that it often engenders can produce inadequate knowledge practices, we do not limit the narratives and imaginaries of future scenarios to human actors alone; rather, we propose that landscape itself can be conceptualised as both a material archive of predatory exploitation and industrial debris as well as a protagonist, a character in this process. We invite presentations that examine regenerative environmental and cultural practices building from film, animation, poetry, drawing and graphic ethnography.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper and the accompanying audiovisual piece propose a sensory and imaginative exploration of the extractive landscape surrounding the mining town of Schefferville and the Innu community of Matimekush - Lac John, Québec.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing from my current PhD project and from ethnographic and audio-visual materials gathered during a first fieldwork research in 2022, this paper and the accompanying audiovisual piece propose an audiovisual exploration of the extractive landscape surrounding the mining town of Schefferville and the Innu community of Matimekush – Lac John, Northern Québec. Combining images, sound and text, they both invite to a sensory and imaginative engagement with the landscape itself and with the human and nonhuman beings and stories that inhabit it.
While one of the primary goals of the piece is to convey a sense of how extractive operations have impacted and continue to impact the territory around Schefferville and the life of the human and nonhuman beings inhabiting it, it also proposes an expanded reflection on the territory by engaging with its human, nonhuman, natural, infrastructural and metallic elements. Blending ethnography, observational audiovisual practices, eco-fictional scenes, and sensory descriptions, this piece is conceived as a first experimental approach towards a framework that allows for the connection of the multiple fragments emerging from oral and written histories, human, nonhuman and material relations, cultural productions and scientific data, as well as past memories, lived experiences of the present(s) and imagined futures. By threading these disparate and sometimes contradictory materials together, the accompanying paper also questions the contemporary aesthetics and representations of extractive landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
Ocean acidification is a global threat to shellfish aquaculture since many farmed species are sensitive to changes in carbonate chemistry. Looking to the sensory affects and interspecies relations between marine life, scientists and oyster farmers, this paper engages OA from a multispecies angle.
Paper long abstract:
This paper gives an ethnographic account of how environmental affect and multispecies relations gave rise to environmental awareness of ocean acidification and its far reaching consequences for national and international shellfish aquaculture practices and policy. The careful "arts of noticing" (Tsing 2015) of a community, concentrating especially in the effort of one family-owned hatchery, sounded an alarm for a nationwide industry where oysters became to the ocean what the canary is to the coal mine. Ocean acidification (OA) is recognized as a global threat to the shellfish aquaculture industry because many farmed species are sensitive to changes in carbonate chemistry, a consequence of OA, which is increasing at unprecedented rates. Looking to the material encounters, sensory relationships and inter-species narratives emerging between marine life, acidifying waters, natural scientists and oyster farmers, this paper engages ocean acidification from a multispecies angle. It presents a multimodal mapping that engages ocean acidification as a compound crisis of “natureculture” (Haraway 2016); that is as the complex outcome of the interaction of anthropogenic histories with ecological/chemical/climatic dynamics. The paper aims to be given as a performance lecture that includes audiovisual and more-than-human perspectives on environmental restoration "from the bottom up".