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- Convenors:
-
Áki Guðni Karlsson
(University of Iceland)
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein (University of Iceland)
Veera Kinnunen (University of Oulu)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Location:
- G24
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
Human existence unfolds in relationships that connect us to other animals, plants, microbes and the environment. This relational understanding of the agency of humans and more-than-humans raises questions about how people and other species and life forms mutually shape life and death.
Long Abstract:
Human existence unfolds in relationships that connect us to other animals, plants, microbes and the environment. This relational understanding of the agency of humans and more-than-humans raises questions about how people and other species and life forms mutually shape life and death on a day-to-day basis. Fermentation, composting, and sustainable agricultural practices are examples of interspecies communication conveying care and a sense of purpose and belonging.
One Health is a transdisciplinary and collaborative paradigm that recognizes the shared environment and interconnection between people, animals, plants and microbes. The approach promotes health and wellbeing for humans, animals and the environment, emphasizing coordination, communication, and joint efforts across disciplines. The approach has facilitated new ways of handling contemporary challenges such as food security and safety, emerging and endemic zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial and drug resistance, climate change as well as different types of environmental pollutants. The One Health paradigm has broad appeal in the natural and health sciences, but this panel invites ethnologists and folklorists to engage with interspecies relations and mutualistic care in everyday life.
The panel invites us to ask: How do we care for bodies, materials, and co-species? How do people care for themselves, others, and the earth through everyday activities such as cooking/fermenting/composting/gardening/shopping/recycling/etc? How can these interspecies practices encourage diverse ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing in our current times of uncertainty? How do more-than-human relationships generate practices, consciousness, imaginaries, narratives, emotions, and social bonds? What kind of futures could this lead us to?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 June, 2023, -tok thompson (University of Southern California)
Paper short abstract:
The inclusion of the posthuman paradigm with One Health approaches presents challenges: what constitutes the ethics of health in a more-than-human environment? Compassion has been discussed as a possible candidate: my talk extends a posthuman discussion of compassion as a trans-special rhetoric.
Paper long abstract:
The inclusion of the posthuman paradigm with One Health approaches presents fundamental philosophical challenges: what constitutes the ethics of health in a more-than-human environment? (Melani & Blue 2020, Freise and Nuyts 2017). Contemporary times have seen an explosion in the discourse regarding more-than-human stakeholders, very often with expanding notions of legal rights and protections. How to make sense of other agents, and other stakeholders, in an entwined existence on planet earth? Compassion has been mentioned by several scholars (e.g. Wolfe 2010, Acampora 2006, Arnould-Bloomfield 2015, Chew 2014) as a possible candidate for navigating such issues. Yet, problematically, the scholarship thus far approaches compassion via a Western philosophical sense, discussing it solely as a product of humans. Rather, as I discuss, we can bring in both indigenous views and emerging data from ethology to show how compassion is not limited to humans: it seems instead an essential part of much of life on earth, including (but not limited to) human and other-than-human linkages and folk groups (e.g. Haraway 2003). As in the tale of the Lion and the Mouse (ATU 156), the rhetoric of compassion allows a truly posthuman approach towards navigating inter-special ethics, as well as allowing us to understand some of the unique folk groups, including interspecial folk groups, that can arise via this powerfully motivating force.
Lara Sabra (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Paper short abstract:
Since 2019, Beirut, Lebanon has faced a socio-economic collapse and escalating political violence. Amid these precarious conditions, I examine practices of care between urban inhabitants and street cats. I argue that these multispecies relationships reveal an alternative way of living with crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2019, the population of Beirut, Lebanon has faced a socio-economic collapse compounded by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. My research considers how ordinary people make life possible amid such precarious conditions. Specifically, I study care-giving practices between urban residents and the hundreds of stray cats that live in Beirut. I draw on ethnographic data to examine the voluntary and dispersed acts of feeding that urban inhabitants undertake to care for the street cats, which are neglected by government institutions.
In my paper, I argue that these practices of multispecies care point to cracks in the city’s landscape and in its deadened atmosphere. By “crack,” I mean gaps or openings within the monolithic systems of power that pervade our lives. These cracks are small spaces of alterity where humans and animals relate with and care for one another, and where the city is used and occupied in different ways. For example, cat-feeders forge their own paths through the city and build feeding stations in spaces that are convenient to them. In a city that is overwhelmingly privatized and securitized, cat-feeders strive to create shared space with the stray cats; they create an alternative version of the city.
In sum, I argue that the cat-feeders’ relationships with the cats point to an alternative way of living life and occupying space within Beirut’s dystopian reality. My paper ends by reflecting on what the cat-feeders of Beirut may teach us about how to live with crisis.
Auður Viðarsdóttir (Háskóli Íslands)
Paper short abstract:
What is food? What is not food? How does our perception of food affect how we place ourselves in the lifeworld, or vice versa?
Paper long abstract:
Humans depend on other species every day for their survival through the basic act of eating. While many do not actively reflect on what they choose to eat or not to eat on a daily basis, it is a conscious and purposeful endeavour for others. This applies to people who adhere to a vegan diet and have for various reasons eliminated meat and other animal products from their consumption.
This paper is based on an ethnographic inquiry being made into the eating habits and food related values among vegans in Iceland. The objective is to learn from their experiences, to inform a larger multi-disciplinary research project based at the University of Iceland titled Sustainable Healthy Diets: Filling the Gaps and Paving the Way for a Sustainable Future. The aim is to gather data and knowledge that can guide policy makers and the public towards a future of more sustainable and healthier foodways.
This paper investigates the apparent synergy between people’s values and their perception of food/non-food, and how this has developed in distinct ways among these individuals since changing their diet. Becoming more attuned to one’s own body and wellbeing seems to extend to other organisms and make way for a new perspective on the lifeworld and their own place in it. One could argue that is precisely what is needed in order to confront and reverse the man-made environmental crisis we face.
Meltem Turkoz (Boğaziçi University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores applied puppetry as interspecies practice which opens more-than-human relational fields and can disrupt or decenter knowledge about selves and others for greater well-being.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores applied puppetry as interspecies practice which opens more-than-human relational fields and can disrupt or decenter knowledge about selves and others for greater well-being. To train to animate puppets and objects for performance is an education in material agency and vibrant matter (Bennett). "When people are engaged in puppetry practice, they are already practicing cognitive empathy by attempting to understand how people, beings and other consciousnesses may move, think, act and react" (Astles). Puppets are called upon in child and adult therapy, in autism and dementia care, and are utilized in the liminal spaces of illness by traditional healers or by applied puppetry practitioners. Working with the animation of puppets, objects, and materials, provides an aesthetic and a methodology for exploring, manifesting and performing empathy, connectedness and "topographies of flesh" (McWeeny). Those who study puppetry tend to "consider people, objects, animals, and the natural and fabricated worlds as sharing some DNA and reflecting our assorted strengths and shortcomings back to each other in a porous feedback loop" (Schutzman). The paper will draw from applied puppetry workshops held with selected health professionals, as well as migrant and local groups affected by conflict, displacement, polarization, and economic instability in Istanbul.
Veera Kinnunen (University of Oulu)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores Bokashi as an emerging form of symbiotic infrastructure that demands allying with microbes. This hands-on practice both challenges and complements currently existing infrastructural assemblages, and as such enables imagining different more-than-human futures.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores an emerging form of symbiotic infrastructure, which both challenges and complements currently existing infrastructural assemblages, and as such enables imagining different more-than-human futures.
Bokashi composting is a relatively new form of waste care in urban households. It is based on fermenting food waste with a help of a symbiotic consortium of beneficial microbes. The method makes practitioners aware of the multitude of microbes - and even requires allying with them. Welcoming unruly microbial life into an urban home challenges prevailing imaginations considering purity, health, danger, and even life and death. Therefore, in all its mundane messiness, bokashi is a hands-on practice of making different futures, and not solely for human benefit. However, bokashi is not all about unconditional welcoming. The paper, therefore, asks, what forms of communities and collectives are formed in the practice of bokashi composting. Whose health is being cared-for, and whose neglected? With whom do bokashi makers form bonds and ally with striving for collective futures? And further, who are closed out of these collectives?
Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on a qualitative and visual research on the emotional connection between sourdough bakers and their sourdough. It explores how sourdough baking reflects on other values in their life and what this human-microbial relationship means to the baker's everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
People often bake sourdough for practical reasons. It's healthier than yeasted bread and it's cheaper to do it yourself. But people also bake for reasons that have nothing to do with practicality. Baking sourdough bread can f.ex. be a form of meditation. The process evokes all the bakers senses; smell, touch, sight and even hearing, when listening to the bread's cackling sound after baking. The baking process is a slow one, controlled by the microbes fermenting the dough. Accepting that the baker has little control of the speed of which the microbes work can both be the biggest challenge for the baker as well as the biggest lesson in mindfulness. People also bake for emotional reasons. A sourdough can be kept alive for a long time, for centuries even. A baker might own a sourdough that has been kept alive within his family for centuries. For many the sourdough is not simply an ingredient to bake with but something with emotional value that connects them to other people every time they attend to their sourdough or bake.
This paper, based on a qualitative and visual research on the connection between sourdough bakers and their sourdough, focuses on the emotional and physical connection bakers have with their sourdough. I will explore what sourdough baking represents to the baker, how it reflects on other values in their life and what this human-microbial relationship between the baker and the sourdough mother means to the baker in his everyday life.
Eysteinn Ari Bragason (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores interspecies relations and care for soil and water health through practices of material transformation involved in composting. Focusing on processes of breakdown unfolds the coming together of human and nonhuman trajectories in mutually composing the grounds for everyday living.
Paper long abstract:
The paper builds on examples from a qualitative questionnaire about composting practices in Iceland and interviews revolving around composting material from dry toilets. Composting unfolds as a practice that supports ecological consciousness in times of uncertainty. The empirical material indicates concerns about the environmental risks of modern waste disposal and chemical soil fertilization and a longing for actively engaging in the making of healthier and more inclusive systems.
Focusing on waste and microbe imaginaries and their implications on soil and water health I explore how composting presents ways of caring that proposes different relationalities, practices and issues surrounding waste management, soil fertilizing and sustainability.
The circular process of composting waste materials to nutrients, the active role of more-than-human relationships and the labor of care involved goes against the grain of linear thinking and the commercial logic of contemporary western society, it connects humans with other beings, twists the gaze and leads to critical questions about conventional food production, waste management and well being on another scale.
Composting practices involve particular interspecies relations, the concoction of various elements and a commitment in collaborative more-than-human practices of material transformation. Microbes are a key factor in this circular transformation of organic matter and the familiarity with matter, microbes and material processes of breakdown has its consequences and implications that shape futures and the grounds for everyday living.
Áki Guðni Karlsson (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores human-microbial interactions within the two contexts of everyday life and scientific research. A detachment between the micro and macro levels of experience mirrors the fundamentally different approaches of social and human sciences versus the health and biological sciences.
Paper long abstract:
While science tells us that we are constantly interacting with microbial ecologies that exist within us, on us and all around us, people generally do not view their day to day experiences in this light. How do people and scientists “talk” with and about microbes? How do different scientific cultures approach microbial cultures? Is the detachment we see between the macro and micro levels of both everyday experience and scientific research a way to cope with the uncertainty of microbial life, and is it likely to change with new approaches and new instruments of research?
In this paper we seek to explore the relationships formed between the human-microbial worlds of everyday experience, and the interdisciplinary research that has evolved around them, seeing how the trials of each are mirrored in the challenges of the other. In particular, we look at the collaboration between social, biological and health sciences in formulating novel approaches and methods, and the uncertainties they encounter. The paper also seeks to outline the future prospects and challenges of moving from interdisciplinary collaboration to a transdisciplinary paradigm like One Health for both culture and science.
Based on data from the Icelandic SYMBIOSIS-project, bringing different kinds of experience and expertise to the study of human-microbial interaction, we want to highlight the possibilities of novel approaches to the biological challenges we face as individuals in a society.