Short Abstract:

Encouraging creative research approaches, this panel seeks to explore traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) alive in land-based learning and craft techniques as inspirational resource for integrating more-than-human sociality and solidarity into everyday practices.

Long Abstract:

In the current poly-crisis, we are facing the urgent need of re-shaping our ecological relationships and of re-learning the sociality of more-than-human life. Especially in industrial societal contexts, paradigmatically detached from the non-human, as well as in urbanized ones where nature easily shrinks to the level of a rationalized ‘other’, humans have largely lost ecological literacy. Moreover, the analytical concept of ‘Anthropocene’, intended to capture this dilemma, remains starkly anthropocentric. Unwriting that analysis, Abram (2020) proposed the concept of ‘Humilocene’ – based on human, but also humus – which echoes humble, humility, even humiliation. However, how we re-create awareness towards non-human energies shaping our world in its various physical, sensory, emotional and spiritual dimensions has proved to be an ambivalent question. Against the persistent danger of right-wing populist instrumentalisation, we continue to believe in the cognitive value of critically examining the human-ecological wisdom traditionalised within land-based, emplaced forms of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). In this panel, we focus on creative forms of land-based learning, such as craft techniques, that embody relationships within the more-than human-world and offer ways of material ‘re-indigenisation’ (Abram) in the Humilocene. How does unwriting foster new (trans-)formations and narrations of multivalent cultural knowledge and heritage? How can Indigenous knowledge unwrite the relationality of those no-longer-indigenous-to-place? How might unwriting illuminate environmental engagement in ways that address the current poly-crisis?

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