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- Convenors:
-
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch
(Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)
Camilla Brudin Borg Camilla Brudin Borg (One by walking, The University of Gothenburg)
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- Chair:
-
Camilla Brudin Borg Camilla Brudin Borg
(One by walking, The University of Gothenburg)
- Formats:
- Panel Workshop
- Streams:
- Creativity, Sensibility, Experience, and Expression
- Location:
- Room 3
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores mobile research methods in use in environmental history, geography, and anthropology as a way of generating new understandings of histories of place and environment, and knowledge co-production. Participants' mobile "walks" are demonstrated/discussed in a local nature space.
Long Abstract:
This engaged workshop will focus on developing walking-based tools to raise awareness and responsibility for fragile environments past and present. The workshop takes two core themes: sustainability and tactile human-environment interaction. We will focus in particular on challenges and possibilities in the meeting of historical/traditional uses of nature and current (post-Corona) trends for transforming attitudes and practices towards increased sustainability. Through an exploration of research methods, we draw attention to the effects of increased human impact on fragile local ecosystems, common to many public and nature spaces in the Nordic region. Mobile research methods (e.g. walking interviews, studying archives and maps in situ, citizen science projects relying on mobility) can be fruitfully employed to align transdisciplinary perspectives and collaboration for generating new understandings of the histories of place and of environment. The workshop will explore co-production of knowledge across different typologies/topographies of mobility, considering e.g. why and how can the moving body foster environmental care and understanding, and how historical perspectives on mobile methods can open bodily awareness supporting environmental transitions. Participants will be asked to bring to the workshop a "walk", i.e. a mobile means of engaging with and through physical space. These walks will then be taught, practiced and performed among participants in a local Oulu nature space.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
My proposal is to walk along the routes marked out around a village situated on a verge of an open-pit lignite mine in Poland. The practice facilitates an etnographic insight into complex environmental entanglements of extractivism - a landscape shaped by silencing and weed infestation.
Paper long abstract:
My proposal situates itself between methodological intervention into etnographic research on extractivist landscapes and decolonial perspectives on knowledge production, especially the ethical postulate so as the research avoids following the resource extraction modes in relation to information obtained during a fieldwork. The case study I refer to is a tiny village of Opolno-Zdrój which sits on the edge of Turów, an opencast lignite mine and a power station, and also on the Polish-Czech-German border. Its predicaments reflect in cross-border terms the typical discrepancies and controversies associated with lignite mining. Historically - a German sanatorium, Bad Oppelsdorf, after incorporation into Polish People’s Republic in 1945 it was subject to a planned economy scheme where land was transformed into mine property and its population grew of incentivized resettlement of workforce, mainly from the territories incorporated into Soviet Union. Today the mine continues to operate in spite of several lawsuits, just transitions schemes which are not taken into account by its owners and a growing criticism of coal-fired power generation. 70 years on Opolno-Zdrój keeps its temporalities in a precarious gap between existence and non-existence. Practices of walking I could observe and become part of make us think across the political and discursive divide created by the opposing stance: the mine continuing until 2044 or not any more. I will try to show how the environmental entanglements of village’s „non-existence” are vital contributors to the stories not told.
Paper short abstract:
Smell is a vital aspect of place-making at all scales. I explore smell as a multispecies communication tool for navigating place and environment and a method for enabling responses between living and non-living entities through the vibrancy and tangibility of chemicals they produce.
Paper long abstract:
Smell is fundamental to food, culture, memory, communication and health. It is affective: acting directly on bodies, bypassing language. Rapid changes in smellscapes have strong physiological effects. Mining, urbanisation, farming, transportation, etc radically alter the materiality of environments and their smells, shifting how human and non-human inhabitants understand, navigate and consume them. Odorants are sensitive to temperature fluctuations and climate change and are critical, often neglected aspects of environmental and cultural change, grief, loss and hope. I am interested in smellscape mapping as a mobile research method that help us understand more-than-human environments, imagine their histories and futures, navigate the emotions of ecological change and co-create knowledge with the living and non-living entities around us.
Paper short abstract:
My paper explores research-creation as a more-than-human methodology, which I will bring to bear on walking research. I will perform an auto-ethnographic inquiry into walking as an epistemological process and generate new understandings of place, sensory experience, embodiment, and movement.
Paper long abstract:
Research-creation is an experimental site where art practice, theoretical concepts, and research coalesce to form new dimensions of knowledge. Movement is at the heart of research-creation and like a heart, the artist-scholar must expand and contract across disciplines, performing an uncanny dance that traverses notions of within and without, intuition and intellect, theory and practice. Attentive to moments of emergence and rupture, research-creation concentrates on process rather than product. Constituted by rhythm and affect, it is a form of thinking-in-movement — an act of thinking and thinking in the act — which walking brings to light. Walking research-creation events may produce objects and artefacts, but they also do labour— they are works of art. Thus, intentional walking with all senses engaged is a form of working in and with the environment.
My paper explores research-creation as a more-than-human methodology informed by new materialisms and posthumanisms, which I will bring to bear on walking research. I will conduct an auto-ethnographic examination of a roadside walk amongst the creeks, fields, and forests of the Hudson Valley, New York, harnessing research-creational methods to contemplate concepts within walking research that are accountable to Indigenous knowledges — to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human. Place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and movement will be explored. I aim to show how walking research-creation events not only reflect reality but instantiate thought. In the context of the Anthropocene, research-creation offers new understandings of the world as an earth system in which humans are an entanglement of being.