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- Convenors:
-
Roger Norum
(University of Oulu)
Veera Kinnunen (University of Lapland)
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- Discussant:
-
Tim Ingold
(University of Aberdeen)
- Format:
- Panel+Workshop
Short Abstract:
This panel+workshop session invites contributions that critically engage with concepts and cultural relevance of circularity in the era of polycrisis. We welcome standard papers and creative proposals that unwrite forms and notions of circularities and cyclicities across theory, method & practice.
Long Abstract:
Circular motifs predate the written history of humankind, standing in for notions of emergence, divine being, infinity, recursivity, and seasonality, among other themes. In ethnology, folklore and cognate fields, cyclical notions have often been associated with traditional worldviews (natural, mystical, embodied), contesting modern, more linear conceptions of temporal progress. The concept of circulation, meanwhile, has multiple associations with modernity and modern life, whether linked to ideas, goods, or social dynamics (Gänger 2017; Appadurai and Rao 2023). Circulation often refers to open-ended mobilities, speaking to society as a system of conduits, in which materials and wealth flow incessantly to nourish a process of accumulation and growth; ideas, newspapers, gossip, traffic, air, money, and waste all "circulate" (Swyngedow 2006; Gänger 2017). In the era of environmental change and polycrisis, circular motifs have re-emerged with fresh appeal. Circular thinking in the ecological imaginary draws on the cyclical imagery of endless return, pointing toward a social and political reality where materials and ideas cycle and generate new (and improved!) materials, ideas and alliances, potentially ad infinitum and hopefully sustainably (Pape & Gold 2023). Building on important work on lines and rhythms (e.g. Ingold 1993, 2016), we welcome contributions that engage critically with the cultural relevance of circularity across theory, method and practice. Through its dual format, this panel encourages both standard paper presentations and creative workshop-style interventions from diverse perspectives and disciplines that unwrite one or more of these notions—cycles, circles, or circulations—as etymologically linked concepts that are, compellingly, rarely analogous.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This paper will present insights into our ongoing research on thinking about the world through sample-based synthesis and harmonic theory. By creatively and playfully re-cycling empirical data we are balancing the alleged rupture between imagination and real life in empirical research.
Contribution long abstract:
Sampling audio has become common, from voice messages to field recordings. These samples are often only used briefly and then discarded, becoming a form of sonic trash. As with other forms of trash, there is potential for recycling: Using techniques from sample-based synthesis we can loop field recordings as a method to re-cycle our sonic environments. By repeatedly looping a recorded sound and increasingly shortening the repetition window, we can create new auditory experiences as the recording transforms into audible waves that can be modulated, tuned, and harmonized. Using these new waves as starting points, we can synthesise alternatives to linearity, discontinuity, score and notation; shifting from environment to surrounding.
We engage in synthesis and sampling not only as an embodied practice but also as an analytical approach. By slowing down our engagement with field recordings through synthesis we are de-centering our agency by sending information into the loop. As Ingold remarked, notations and scores are standing for sound themselves, not concepts and ideas (2007:11). We experiment with the reversal: by re-cycling sound, a score emerges; we are co-creating in a more-than-human context ideas which harmonize with surroundings without neglecting discontinuities and disharmonies. Through synthesis, we are exploring the interplay between atomic resonances that clock the rhythms of our world and our human temporalities. Thus, by re-tuning sonic samples of our environments, we search for alternative cosmopolitical perspectives to the well-tempered concepts of modern science, while playfully breaking with and re-cycling those circles we critically see as being vicious.
Contribution short abstract:
The presentation brings together the control of circulation as an apparatus of power and the relational idea of linear dwelling in an ethnographic study of distinct practices linked to the EU and to the Greek state border policies in order to think about borders and hospitality.
Contribution long abstract:
The work of Michel Foucault (2007) on the emergence of certain economies of modern power has brought to our attention how the organization of circulation links to ‘security governance’. The presentation brings together the security/circulation apparatus with the relational approach to life introduced by Tim Ingold (1993, 2006), a life lived across lines that constantly correspond to one another, the idea of ‘linear dwelling’. It brings these together in the ethnography in order to think about borders and migration. Drawing on anthropological research conducted on land borders in Greece and sea borders at the Mediterranean sea, it explores how these two different ‘shapes’ of life, play out in different practices linked to border policies (monitoring movement and circumventing the control of circulation). The paper focuses on heterogeneous rationalities, on monitoring circulation in assisting cross borders and refugee seekers by sea rescue boats, and try to see how lines and circles are associated and the different expressions of hospitality they depict.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper examines postmortem material cycles as a site of "unwriting" conventional burial methods. Focusing on circular narratives inherent in environmentally friendly burial alternatives, it aims to investigate how the concept of sustainability circulates in the funeral industry.
Contribution long abstract:
The cycle of becoming and decay is intrinsic to existence. Yet, conventional burial practices often interrupt the completion of decomposition processes, leaving traces of postmodern civilization in the cemetery. In contemporary Western societies, the dead are frequently socially excluded, severing them from the generational circles of life. Proponents of alternative burial methods argue that the rise of the modern funeral industry has led to this disruption of natural rhythms. Against the backdrop of the Anthropocene the environmental impact of burials that materializes in the grave has come to the fore. Innovative technologies such as human composting or alkaline hydrolysis demonstrate the potential for an eco-friendly “recycling” of mortal remains. The concept of sustainability circulates within discourses in the funerary sector and is often marketed with nature-mystical notions. For some, the popular woodland burials reflect the transfer of the energies of the deceased into the roots of trees - one of many examples of the comforting imagery offered by alternative funeral providers. Leading companies such as “Recompose”, “Return Home” or “Re-Erdigung” utilize symbols of infinity in their branding and express the idea of harmonious merging with a greater whole in their very names.
These developments reflect both an individual longing for eternal life and a societal shift towards reconnecting with a more traditional, “natural” way of dying. This contribution draws on qualitative research into contemporary funerary culture to interpret the appeal of cyclical narratives. By presenting sustainable solutions, it proposes a critical reassessment of long-standing practices in the funeral industry.
Contribution short abstract:
In this short workshop based on Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning principles, we will explore how we might break out of our linear sustainability thinking. What might it mean to think in circles? By doing so, can we 'unwrite' and transform how we approach learning for sustainablity?
Contribution long abstract:
Space and place shape our thinking. In many traditions, learning occurs in circles, from First Nations talking circles to Freirean culture circles. Yet our modern higher education culture overwhelmingly favours linearity. It places learners in rows opposite a teacher, which emphasises hierarchy and prioritises learning as knowledge transference instead of co-creation and collaboration.
In parallel, notions of circularity are fundamental to the concept of sustainability (the circle of life, recycling). Yet sustainable development narratives retain modernist ideas of hierarchies and linear progress, with humans as the only actors striving to move us ever onwards towards further sustainability goals. Why is our thinking thus constrained? To what extent are our assumptions conditioned by how we position our learning?
In this short circle workshop based on Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning principles, we will explore how we might break out of our linear sustainability thinking. Starting with a disorienting dilemma in the middle of our circle, we will investigate what happens when our thinking goes around and around. Can we challenge ourselves to unravel our tightly-knit hegemonic assumptions about sustainability? When we know our thoughts will return to us, does it encourage our thinking to transform rather than merely (re)transmit? How comfortable are we outside our linear thinking culture?
Contribution short abstract:
An exploratory workshop, investigating representations and ideas of circle, cycle and circulation prompted by objects from a maritime collection
Contribution long abstract:
This workshop is an opportunity to unwrite representations and ideas of circle, cycle and circulation, by working collaboratively with a set of objects from the maritime collection of Trinity House of Leith, Scotland.
Approaching objects through the connection with the sea that underpins their presence as museum items, the session embraces the fluid nature of the sea as both unsettling and generative, and explores its potential as research framework.
For the first part of the session, I will share some of the results of my work with the selected objects, showcasing methodological options focused on the interplay and tension between materiality and meaning.
In the second part, participants will engage with the objects, experimenting with the proposed methods to unpick shifting, diffractive nuances that the concepts of circularity and cyclicity can yield through the aqueous lens.
Contribution short abstract:
Resource exploitation in remote Arctic Lapland adjoins different global processes, which brings about confusing associations. Presenting this messy confusion in writing as it relates to the surface mine of Hannukainen might be best accomplished by a free-circulating narrative. But how exactly?
Contribution long abstract:
Lapland, North Europe, is a place where cyclical worldviews collide with circulatory world systems and circular economic imagination. It is a place of indigenous and colonial friction. Of fabulistic visions of resource extraction by the mining industry. A place with a tourism industry based on implausibly pristine nature in need of infrastructural redevelopment. The lines that branch out from these interconnected arenas extend to the global economy with its cyclical flow, making sensical narratives flawed from the onset.
A case in point is the abandoned surface mine of Hannukainen in Kolari. Hannukainen is practically a non-place. A place where the only tangible elements are mounds of rocks and restless cavities antithetical to the seemingly untouched natural landscape surrounding them. The mine's future is indecipherable, with plans to reopen the mine emerging recurringly. It is a transient space, near-wholly human made, with labyrinthine architecture of unstable design inducing free-flowing associations reaching far and wide and back again.
This paper explores ways to imbue the written narrative of the strange mine with a sense that emulates on-site fielding. Dérive approach, an observational walk along an unpremeditated path, is sought out in creative academic writing with several adjoining looping narratives. The goal is to present the confusion and surprising associations anew in a book-format with each loop, where the narration leads the reader repeatedly back to already read sections, generating deeper perspective. The experiment aims to provide an alternative template for documenting messiness by unwriting the standard making-sense aspect of narration.
Contribution short abstract:
Circularities and circulations are ultimately forms of movement, therefore material and tangible. This contribution argues that these qualities make them concretely existing bodies, accessible and usable by people in their life-projects.
Contribution long abstract:
Appadurai (2008) deconstructs the forms of global circulation as made of circuits, speed, and scale. These categories at once give shape and are shaped by the form of the circulation itself, and give account of its materiality and measurability. Ingold (1993) describes forms as the emergent embodiment of the cycles and rhythms that give rise to them. Thus, we can understand - and measure - circular forms as embodied responses and results of the cycles and rhythms that have generated them. Therefore, the paper contends that, as people attune themselves with the rhythms that make up a specific form of circulation, they come to be part of its materiality. Becoming carriers and factors in the degree of speed and scale that the circulation works at, they are able to use it for their life-projects.
The ethnography studies an agricultural cooperative founded in 2010 by Sahelian migrant workers who grow and sell biological products in Rome, Italy. The workers have entered circulatory metabolic channels through which the city and countryside have mutually fed each other for centuries. They have done so by attuning themselves to specific seasonal and harvesting cycles, to metabolic rhythms and infrastructures of movement. In becoming part of this circulation - carriers of its form, subject to its speed and scale - they have provisioned for their life-project. Moreover, they have also been able to orient the overall shape of the circulation, connecting it to globally circulating forms of sustainable and organic food production.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper examines the different notions and practices of circulation, cycles, and circularity that emerged in a Japanese village following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I discuss how co-designing with disrupted ecologies fosters cohabitability in a post-disaster world.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper examines the different notions and practices of circulation, cycles, and circularity that emerged in a Japanese village named Iitate following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Iitate was a forced evacuation zone that was reopened in 2017. Most of the village is covered by forests that fell outside the decontamination plan of the Japanese state. The state aspires to achieve human control of the environmental consequences and effects of the nuclear fallout by encircling sites of exclusion and by managing the displacement of exposed living beings and non-living things in the radioactive landscape. During my fieldwork in Iitate from 2017-2022, I observed some villagers experimenting with technologies like solar farms to foster new ecological cycles with cattle-raising and rice farming to unwrite the state narrative and cultural belief of disasters critically. These villagers include returning villagers, mostly older people with split families, and younger generations who moved in to pursue diverse lives and dreams. They put themselves into transition from the narrative of separation (from home, for example) to that of a relational being despite the lingering radiation. This paper discusses how they circulate new ideas of co-designing with the disrupted ecologies, and what these new ecological cycles mean in fostering cohabitability in a post-disaster world. My contribution will be a paper-based presentation.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper considers how contemporary Finnish witches see themselves and their actions in relation to nature. What kind of creative solutions, compromises, but also ignorance could be seen in circulatory relationships between nature and a modern Western human with spiritual goals?
Contribution long abstract:
Some trends among Western new spirituality movements have had clear effects on nature and the environment. For instance, the idea that certain plants have intense spiritual efficacy has made plants like white sage endangered because they are overharvested and sold for ritual uses. At the same time, some new spirituality movements, like contemporary witchcraft, highlight the importance of nature and its wellbeing. Many witches at the 2020’s value the idea that a respectful relationship with nature has been an important part of witchcraft throughout centuries.
In this paper, I analyze how contemporary witches in Finland consider themselves and their actions in relation to nature, especially endangered species. What kind of circulatory relationships could be built between (endangered) nature and a modern Western spiritual human? Because the field of contemporary witches is not unified, different kinds of interpretations and views are common. Circulatory relations with nature could be based on various kinds of creative solutions and compromises. However, these relations also reflect different interplays between conscious and ignorant decisions, and considerations about the hierarchy between spiritual goals and the wellbeing of nature.
Contribution short abstract:
In Ulaanbaatar, at a choreographic workshop titled Lost Rivers, it was in circles, under one sky, where participants learnt to move together, beyond cultural differences, to respond to an ecological crisis. Choreography, this paper suggests, offers creative ways to deal with the politics of crises.
Contribution long abstract:
In Mongolia, people believe we all live under two domes: the dome of the ‘ger’ and the dome of ‘tenger’. While the ‘ger’ symbolises the domestic family, ‘tenger’, literally meaning the sky, gestures towards a shared world in which we all live. This paper reflects on the author’s participation in a weeklong choreographic workshop in Ulaanbaatar, both as a mover and an anthropologist. The workshop was part of a larger experimental art project titled Lost Rivers. Recursively analysing, on the one hand, the conceptual discussions during the workshop and, on the other hand, the choreographic process of movement development, the paper seeks, ambitiously, to put into dialogue two different kinds of circularity that emerged during the workshop. Conceptually, participants highlighted that, contrary to the temporal linearity underpinning discourses of the Anthropocene, Mongolian cosmology espouses the cyclicity of life. Rivers may disappear temporarily, but the right human deeds could persuade spirits to revive the rivers. Choreographically, our collective work developed around circular movements that conjured images from water vortices to a flaming fire. Each day of rehearsal began with movement exercises in a circle, where we practiced how to sense and respond to one another. Both conceptual and movement differences, which some scholars would call ‘alterities’, prevailed during rehearsals. However, rather than overcoming such differences, the choreographic modality compelled a privileging of connections, correspondences, and creativity. It was in circles, under one sky—the ‘tenger’, where we learnt to be together, move together, and make something together, beyond analytically delineated differences.
Contribution short abstract:
A presentation which considers the past, present and possible future of Aberdeen's Freedom Lands, a circular territory dating back more than 700 years, revisited and reclaimed by combining the creative exercises of running and writing.
Contribution long abstract:
For more than seven centuries, Aberdeen’s Freedoms have taken circular form, as a territory known to its residents through their exercising of rights of common law, and by an annual practice of riding the bounds. The limits (or marches) of this jurisdictional geography were first landmarked by a ring of earth-bound boulders, then later by sixty-seven numbered and engraved march stones. Those stones remain in situ: on city streets and field margins, along country roads, in woodlands, and by the banks of burns. Based on passages of creative non-fiction writing, and an archive of images, this presentation will offer a personal account of geographical discovery, one where the exercise of learning about these Freedom Lands fuses the process of academic inquiry with a daily habit of long-distance running. What emerges is a deep map, charted according to associative connections made between landscape, locality and biography. Hereabouts circularity exists as prevailing spirit, and a residual property that eventually coalesces into a practised art of place. The presentation will not so much "unwrite" the effort of circulation, but instead reclaim and reenergise it.
Contribution short abstract:
What are the multiple cycles and circularities of renewable electricity? If it is spoken of as endlessly renewable, how to account for the limited lifespan of its infrastructures? If its infrastructures endure as waste, ruin or assets, are they aligned with linear or cyclical temporalities?
Contribution long abstract:
The world of electrical circuits is full of fascination and complexity. Being so difficult to perceive directly, electricity courts a panoply of metaphor, narrative and idiom. People imagine electrons moving through cables like liquid pouring through a pipe, or generators moving electrons from place to place, circulating endlessly yet directionally to provide power or heat where it is desired, or cycling through sinewaves, humming and crackling along cables or through transformers. Electricity exists only in the present – it has no endurance. Switch off the generator and it is gone. Electrical grids supply energy in the here and now, their greatest technical challenge being one of ‘storage’ or extending the instant in which electricity is available.
Electrical infrastructures, on the other hand, move from shiny and new to shabby and broken in just a few decades. The temporal horizon of electrical infrastructure design is often as short as twenty to thirty years, even for renewable energy installations. In a moment when renewable energy infrastructure is being promoted and installed as a matter of urgency, the potential for circular economies of infrastructure is only just coming into focus, and the links between biodiversity protection and infrastructure development are still seen as innovative. This intervention explores the Cycles, Circles, Circulations of electrical infrastructure by unwriting the hegemonic frameworks of renewable energy.
Contribution short abstract:
This abstract proposes combined presentation/workshop in which we practice water coloring along with listening, considering how being with water indicates fluid and complexed relationalities. It demands thinking with water which reveals ongoing negotiations between more-than-human bodies and place.
Contribution long abstract:
Being with water indicates fluid and complexed relationalities; being moved with, moved by, in and out of control but always entangled in a flow or, even, a flux. Using watercolors is a way to sense, feel and understand, watery relationalities. It reveals their fluid and flickering natures. It demands one to follow a movement with movement to be often guided to unforeseeable outcomes as it is the water in the coloring that leads the way. Water coloring reveals ongoing negotiations between more-than-human earthly bodies I shall explore using Merleau-Ponty´s concept of the flesh that allows for bodies to entangle in messy but also sensually effective and proximate ways.
This abstract proposes combined presentation/workshop in which participants will practice with water coloring whilst I share with them my experience of being with water when taking a part, as a complete novice, in a water coloring course as a part of a fieldwork. Following Strang (2014) who claims that water is useful for ‘thinking with’ the aim of the presentation/workshop is to consider how we, as bio-cultural beings or ‘organs of this world (Abram 1997), may rethink place relationalities through water materialities, qualities, motions and flows.
Contribution long abstract:
The long and streamlined boat, luossafanas in Sámi, is a significant epitome of the Deatnu (Teno river) Sámi culture. The local way of living is grounded on cycles of the river including the fluctuating level and temperature of the water. These are important factors to be considered in fishing salmon with traditional fishing techniques including drift net and weir. Regardless of the task – be it fishing or traveling – a boat has been an ideal and crucial object needed for living with Deatnu.
The boatmaking skill and suitable form of the boat has formed over centuries and maintained its traditional form to this day. Yet, the alarming decline of Atlantic salmon stocks and the resulting fishing ban have brought the way of life at Deatnu valley under threat. The closure of the river has been particularly harmful for maintaining the practice of boat making as the demand for new boats has collapsed. Also, other societal and environmental changes at the river valley have brought the important skill and practice of boatmaking on the edge of extinction.
Our contribution is based on a project of making a traditional pole boat by a Sámi boatmaker from Utsjoki village and accompanying minidocumentary on the making process. The making from gathering raw materials to the end product of “fishy” and beautiful boat materializes not only the boatmaker's but also the Sámi community’s historical knowledge and skill. The boat helps the community to remember their traditions and to carry them forward into the future.
Contribution short abstract:
In my presentation, I will examine a wreck and its life combined with local people and marine archeological research using also video poem and asemic writing
Contribution long abstract:
In my presentation, I will examine the underwater landscape of an island in the south-western archipelago of Finland and one of its wrecks in the context of the cultural cycle. What kind of encounters did the peasant culture and the rococo luxury goods of the bypassing East-West trade route through this archipelago in the 17th century create? These encounters and their existence can be viewed as a cyclical process of knowledge and experience through, for example, Foucault's heterotopia and Lefebvre's rhythmic analysis.
I start with a story that has been told by islanders for centuries. It is familiar to me because I have lived on the island. But what do I really remember, what have I observed, what have I imagined?
I will examine the wrecks circulations of knowledge in my presentation with the help of a poetry video. I will challenge the relationship between scientific knowledge, artistic approach, memory and perception as part of the production and transmission of knowledge about the wreck.
I also invite the listeners of my poetry video and my narrative to settle into the moment of gesture and glimpse, and to live their own line in their own handwriting to be inspired by the moment my poetry video conveys of a maritime disaster that happened centuries ago. During my presentation, I will guide the audience through a moment of asemic poetry.
Contribution short abstract:
Circles appear on human skin after interspecies interactions such as insect bites and the growth of fungi and are shaped by processes like inflammation. The workshop looks through those circles at bodily porosity, unwanted interspecies interactions, and shifting meanings within environmental crises.
Contribution long abstract:
Circular shapes in all shades of red appear on human skin after some close encounters with other species. They include erythema migrans, the early symptom of skin infection with spirochetal bacteria from the genus Borrelia, usually transmitted by a tick bite, tinea corporis known as ringworm – from the shape of a worm that eats its tail – a fungal infection of dermatophyte, or a regular mosquito bite causing an allergic reaction with its saliva. All of them and others show as circles on human skin. From the biological perspective, the circular shape is a response to radial inflammatory reaction or fungal diffusion (Sudo and Fujimoto 2022). Often, the circle symbolises unity and wholeness, yet here, it emphasises human vulnerability and porosity.
In this contribution, I will look through the lenses of the circular erythema at the multispecies interactions on human skin. I will open it up from micro to macro scales and aim to unwrite the circularity of our relations with unwanted non-humans and the flows of bodily fluids.
The contribution will have a form of workshop-style intervention, through which I invite the participants to look together at the implications of the bodily interspecies reactions as sites of circulatory exchange. I will look for answers to what new rhythms and forms emerge when circular lines create layers of growth in social cycles and systems of reciprocity between species. I will also ask what meanings these circles take on within health, illness, and the crisis we all live in.