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Cloudbreak: Haiku and the More-than-Human World

Posted on by paul.merchant

 

 

Dr Carrie Etter

Department of English

 

Growing up in Normal, Illinois, I began writing (really bad) poetry at the age of fourteen, and at the age of fifteen, undertaking research for the high school debate team at the nearby university library, one day I accidentally ended up on the sixth rather than the fifth floor and discovered the library’s store of literary journals. This included some British magazines in which I later published some of my poems, Ambit, PN Review, and Stand. I also discovered Modern Haiku, the foremost English-language magazine for haiku and senryu, and not long after on the same floor of Milner Library at Illinois State University, I also found R.H. Blyth’s four-volume set on the form.

Where I grew up in West Normal, I lived within a quarter-mile of corn and soybean fields, and my first job at 15 had been as the only girl on a fifteen-member maintenance crew at Comlara Park, a multi-purpose site including a campground and swimming pool. In one summer I stained over a hundred picnic tables, encountered raccoons, cranes, gophers, and many other fauna, probably ate my body weight in mulberries, and helped build several boat docks. This is all to say that at that time of my life, I had little sense of a barrier between myself and the more-than-human.

At eighteen I wrote and published in Modern Haiku one of my first pieces, which the next year was happily reprinted in Tokyo-based Mainichi Daily News’ ‘Haiku in English’ column. Keep in mind that at this point in my life, my only association with monarchs was the butterfly (learn more about the Illinois monarch conservation project here: https://illinoismonarchproject.org/).

 

monarch

hovers

over the broken kite

 

I also became enamoured of senryu, in which the form engages with human nature.

 

wanting to touch his hair the scent of gardenias

 

Over the decades, with moves to Los Angeles in 1988 and London in 2001, haiku became a touchstone for reconnection with the natural world wherever I lived, and every so often I would send these poems into the larger world for publication. In January 2023, I began working with PGR Paul Chambers on haiku and deep ecology, and through him I became aware that Red Ceilings Press published the occasional volume of haiku alongside its other poetry offerings. Indeed, I had chapbooks by Alan Baker and Ian Seed from Red Ceilings that I treasured.

In early December 2024, I wrote to Mark Cobley, editor at Red Ceilings, to ask if he were considering submissions. He replied that while he’d intended to open later in the month, if I had anything to hand, he’d be glad to see it straight away. He accepted Cloudbreak: Haiku and Senryu, 1987-2018 a few days later. Around this time, I’d been relishing PGR Andy Thatcher’s beautiful photographs of Norway on social media; he was just finishing a four-week fellowship at Stavanger University’s Centre for the Environmental Humanities, The Greenhouse. Among his photographs I found one he took while out running that seemed to capture exquisitely an image from the title haiku, so I asked his permission to use it as my chapbook cover.

 

cloudbreak

the potter lifts a teabowl

off the wheel

 

It’s mid-January, and copies of Cloudbreak are now in my hands, a testament, I hope, to the power of haiku and senryu to connect us with the more-than-human world and ourselves. I’m most grateful to both Paul and Andy for the roles they played in the process of bringing the work to fruition. I’ll conclude with the most recent haiku in the chapbook, which I wrote in Bath in 2018.

 

spring snow

the pears ripen

in the bowl

 

**

Copies of Carrie Etter’s Cloudbreak: Haiku and Senryu, 1987-2018 are available here.

Rivers Old and New: Field Trips as Teaching Method in the MA Environmental Humanities

Posted on by rachel.e.murray

Every year on the MA Environmental Humanities we plan fields trips for our students, which are embedded into our core ‘Introduction’ and ‘Themes’ units. We see lots of benefits to incorporating field trips, which are not typically teaching activities in the Humanities (but are common in eg. Geography and Earth Sciences).

In the Centre for Environmental Humanities, we value field trips as a research method and plan at least one a year (see here). Bringing them into our taught programme is a good way of connecting our research and teaching. Field trips offer an opportunity for the group to get to know each other better, and as our field trips are local, it’s also a chance for those new to Bristol to explore and for residents to see familiar places with fresh, EH-focused, eyes.

This year’s first field trip has become a firm favourite. We join Mathilde Braddock of Steps in Stone on a ‘Rivers Old and New’ walk along the Frome on the eastern edge of Bristol. The walk takes us through woodland along amazing rock formations and Mathilde shows us how to see traces of recent and ancient history in the stone.

Fig. 1 Mathilde teaches us to see like a geologist. All photographs by Marianna Dudley.

Mathilde relates the deep time histories which have shaped the geology, and gives us a chance to think about the role of storytelling in communicating environmental stories.

Fig. 2. Finding coal seams in the rock.

Prompted by Mathilde, we also practice some creative responses to the places we find ourselves in. This year the creative writing practice felt particularly rewarding, and the words below have been shared by two current students on the course. The prompts, sunny autumn riverbank setting, and the quiet, collective moment shared with the group helped me to write a poem, something I’ve not really done before. I’m increasingly interested in exploring how creative practices help us to not just communicate, but also to think in new ways about our subject(s), and I look forward to exploring this with the MA Environmental Humanities students more. Thanks, students, and Mathilde, for a great walk.  

– Dr Marianna Dudley, MA Environmental Humanities Programme Director 

Fig. 3. Rae holds the dust of ancient deserts in her hand (now friable sandstone).

Rae Ferner-Rose  

Stones. 

I think often of an early death. In deep time the difference between twenty-two and one hundred is the blink of an eye. How can we ever say that humans are the only true agent within nature when one rainfall can leave a footprint more significant than any one person is able? But when I rot down into the earth, I feel my real work will begin. My life as a fossil will be my greatest achievement, against all my superficial moments of profound, the record making potential of my remains is beyond any word I could leave with this mouth or any word I could write with these hands. After breath and before the end of the world I will be content as a letter in a story so much larger than myself. 

In Judaism it is customary to leave a stone on a grave instead of flowers. Flowers die but stone can be carried into the afterlife. I like to think that in some time, the body I leave behind will have more to share with stone than flowers. Flowers are beautiful but transient, like life, but like death – lasting, meaningful, quiet – stone will carry me away into a time my body will understand in a way my embodied mind could never dream of. In health I feel like a flower in bloom, vibrant and alive but always with a view to wilting. In illness I felt like stone, static, peaceful ever closer and closer to the earth. Somewhere between twenty-two and a hundred I will drift back to that earth I arrived from. I do not dream of immortality but rather, living forever. 

Jo Ram  

It’s just so comforting walking around and looking, and also being taught how to look. That is what elders and teachers are for. To see a blank stoneface no longer blank. But there is a tension I feel between having to learn all the knowledge, to have expertise in order to connect and between feeling an emptiness when all that knowledge becomes facts rather than a way of knowing. Do we need to know all the facts to have a knowing? Do we need some facts? How many and how much facts do we need to start knowing? Or are facts at all relevant to knowing? But if it weren’t for facts, how do we know we are in the knowing? What is the practice of the knowing?   

Marianna Dudley  

Four seconds to midnight 

is when we appeared 

says the geologist, bending 

time with her words. 

Twenty-four hours of life on earth 

most of it behind us 

time spent in vastness. 

Mountains, faults 

delta plains awash with 

flora, air dense with 

oxygen, soil solid with 

carbon. Dragonflies with wings  

like birds, dragon-birds 

dart through the density 

we would never believe they lived 

if we could not see them 

in the stone.  

Mathilde Braddock 

I’ve always felt a particular magic in the cliff faces, towering trees and unassuming flow of the river in the Frome valley. For the second year in a row, I’ve seen this magic envelop the Environmental Humanities MA students and witnessed how sharing the deep time stories of the land opens us to greater wonder for the world. I am humbled by the words which the students and teachers share in response to the rocks, the river, the stories I tell, and the simple act of pausing and listening, together. 

Offering this walk as part of the MA is a pleasure because it feels like the perfect fit: an eager and open-minded audience, an opportunity for them to get out and about, and a chance for us all to feel connected with our shared environment.

 

Fig. 4. A parting message from the Frome.

 

Investigating non-human histories of Lake Titicaca

Posted on by paul.merchant

Dr. Olivia Arigho Stiles, Research Associate – Rethinking Values of the Anthropocene

 

Figure 1. Donkey in Sampaya on Easter Sunday, April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

 

Over March and April I spent four weeks in Bolivia as part of the British Academy-supported Rethinking Values of the Anthropocene project, overseen by Dr Paul Merchant at the University of Bristol and colleagues further afield.

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined in 2000 by scientists to refer to a new epoch in which human activity has irrevocably changed the earth’s make-up. It has since entered the ‘eco-humanities’ as a way of thinking about climate change, resource extraction and ecological destruction in the past, present and future. How does the Anthropocene intersect with histories of colonisation, for example? What power relations – racial, spatial, gendered – does it call into question? Is the ‘Anthropocene’ even a meaningful concept?

Scientists now don’t think so, at least officially. In March, a committee of geology experts voted down a proposal to declare that the Anthropocene started in the 1950s.

But beyond the scientific establishment, the Anthropocene continues to open pathways to reimagine human relationships with the non-human in the climate crisis. In this vein, I am exploring the Anthropocene from the perspective of a lake in the high Andes, and investigating how Lake Titicaca’s other-than-human histories might enrich or disrupt conceptions of the Anthropocene.

To do this, in April I set about interviewing community activists, government officials and scientists to understand their perspectives on climate change, as well as the change over time in socio-ecological relations at the Lake.

I began in Copacabana, a small town and sacred place on the Bolivian edge of Lake Titicaca: the highest navigable lake on earth, seemingly as vast as an ocean and so close to the sky that the clouds merge with the Andean cordillera in the distance. It is the birthplace of the Inca creator Viracocha and now a site of pilgrimage for the Virgin of Copacabana.

 

 

Figure 2. Lake Titicaca. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

When I arrive it is Holy Week. Choripan (hotdog) stalls line the lakeside, which is barely visible for beer stalls and tents housing the revellers who have come from far and wide. A miniature pony dressed in a Mexican sombrero stands patiently next to a churros stall.  Outside the basilica, a line of large minibuses and cars snakes through the crowds. People are lining up to ch’allar (to bless) their new vehicles which are festooned with flowers.

On Easter Sunday I visit a small village nearby called Sampaya, marked by abandoned dwellings.  It is harvest time, and people are busy in the fields on the heavily terraced hillsides.

Later, in the warm, softer glow of the late afternoon sun I walk up the calvario in Copacabana. The steep path is deserted apart from an elderly man, Pedro*[1], who suddenly begins talking to me. He is from Copacabana but like many Bolivians, worked for several years in Argentina. I ask him about how the lake has changed in his lifetime, whether it is more polluted these days. He pauses before telling me that the pollution is more on the Peruvian side. In Bolivia there is less mining so the waters are purer, he says. Pedro tells me that agriculture is disappearing from the fertile shores of the lake, as more and more young people leave to work in the cities where they can earn more money. The lake is drying up. Where before it used to stretch up to the hills, now the water is receding.

Figure 3. Llama on Isla del Sol. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

 

In Copacabana I also meet Rosa Jalja, a journalist and leader of Mujeres Unidas en Defensa del Agua, a group of 40 women from Aymara and Quechua-speaking communities in Bolivia and Peru who for the past decade have mobilised against pollution. Rosa and the other women have spearheaded anti-pollution and anti-litter campaigns, lobby political authorities and conduct community workshops on climate change in the area. We meet inside the headquarters of Radio Copacabana, the local radio station which broadcasts in Spanish and Aymara where Rosa has a show. I leave feeling very in awe of Rosa Jalja’s energy and commitment.

 

Figure 4. Rosa highlights an advert for pesticides in an edition of El Campo newspaper, Yr. 3, No.29. Dec. 1968-Jan.1969.

In the nearby village of Sahuiña, I visit Ana Aguilar, who once masterminded a ‘frog observatory’, an eco-tourism project dedicated to the enigmatic giant frog native to Lake Titicaca, known in Aymara as k’aira. It has since closed down, but Ana took me in a rowing boat to see a trout farm, one of many which are scattered across the lake. Trout were introduced from the US around 1940, and to a large extent, have had a destructive impact on the lives of the frogs and native fish species. In this project, I draw together the entangled and conflictive lives of frogs, fish and humans, all imperilled in different ways by changes we might call the Anthropocene.

 

Figure 5. Ana Aguilar leads the way. In Sahuina, April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

Figure 6. Ana prepares the rowing boat, Sahuina. Photo, author’s own.

Back in La Paz, I conduct a series of interviews with NGO workers, political authorities and scientists based at the main public university, UMSA. At the Cota Cota campus in the south of the city, I visit the lab of Erick Loayza, a doctoral researcher studying the decline of native fish in the lake.

 

Figure 7. Fish specimens in Erick Loayza’s lab, UMSA. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

Figure 8. Bag of fish specimens in Erick Loayza’s lab, UMSA. April 2024. Photo, author’s own.

 

I return to Copacabana to attend a two day meeting hosted by the Lake Titicaca Authority (ALT), an organisation jointly run by Peru and Bolivia which oversees the management of the lake and its resources, combining an interest in anti-pollution, tourism and heritage.

The meeting brings together local people from villages around the lake, political representatives and technical experts. We hear from representative of the village of Tiwanaku that tourism figures are vastly down on pre-pandemic times, and they’re hoping Instagram influencers might help. In Humamarca, a local guide tells us they hoping their bird viewing platform, the only one in the lake, will bring more visitors.

 

Figure 9. Meeting hosted by ALT, 16 April 2024, Copacabana.Photo, author’s own.

 

Figure 10. Rosa Jalja (Mujeres Unidas) addresses the ALT meeting. Photo, author’s own.

 

 

At lunch, I am sat next to a man from a village near Copacabana opposite Isla Koati (also known as Isla de la Luna). We discuss fishing, and he tells me sadly, like many other people I speak to, that there are less fish now in the lake. It is difficult to make a living from fishing or from agriculture.

Representatives of the tourism board in Yunguyo on the Peruvian side join us, and the discussion turns to linguistic and cultural differences between Aymara-speaking communities on the Peruvian and Bolivian sides of the lake. The lake is an ‘espacio transfronterizo’ (transboundary space), a place that both divides and connects across countries, languages and local cultures. In the age of the Anthropocene, the lake might also be said to connect across deeper cleavages of time. From the residues of mining contamination in the colonial period to sewage pollution from the twentieth century rise of urban centres such as El Alto, the lake resists easy periodisation. By centring its human and non-human entanglements, we might reflect on what, and who, is valued in the Anthropocene.

 

Figure 11. Author with Bolivian flag, Sahuina, April 2024

[1] pseudonym

 

What a Strange Fellow! Monstrous Mushrooms in the Greenhouse

Posted on by paul.merchant

by Sam Le Butt, PhD student in the Department of English

sam.lebutt@bristol.ac.uk

 

Meeting the locals – mushrooms around Stavanger

As a researcher in ecocriticism, I have sometimes felt out of place in the monolithic world of my ‘single honours’ English Literature PhD programme. My research looks at the role of monsters and monstrosity in contemporary environmental fiction, asking how and why authors use representations of monstrosity when talking about environmental pollution and toxicity. However, it can often provoke larger questions about the viability, or propriety, of literary study in service to something, those old disagreements about the ‘instrumentalisation’ of art. On the one hand, that literature and art more generally have the power (and therefore a certain duty?) to synthesise and emote an issue, giving it a tangible and relatable form that allows readers or viewers to feel empathy for others or sympathy for a cause. On the other hand, the idea that any didacticism robs a work of that ineffable artistry that moves us so, indeed qualifies something as art. Perhaps the very contemporary nature of my texts also occasionally provokes scepticism: these are texts that have yet to stand the tests of time, to prove their inventive potential within a culture (according to Derek Attridge’s qualification of literature). There are many fault lines of opinion to be navigated here, but these may be a few reasons why I have always felt more at home in the field of environmental humanities. 

At Bristol, the Centre for Environmental Humanities has proved to be a vital research community for me during my PhD, because although our materials and lines of inquiry are vastly different, those working in the environmental humanities all agree on one thing: that our current moment is undergoing such vast and unprecedented environmental (read also social, political, and cultural) changes, that their intersections with the arts and humanities demands attention. Though I obviously work within the paradigms of literary criticism, my research on monstrosity in fiction is always prismed through an environmental lens: what makes the monster such a popular, effective, or seductive storyteller of environmental disturbance? What draws in so many writers to its narratorial and representative powers? In the monster’s concerns with the self and other, the body, and material being, how does it speak to key environmental concepts such as relationality, entanglement, and epistemological rupture?  

It was questions such as these that I was given the opportunity to explore on my recent University of Stavanger Greenhouse Fellowship on environmental storytelling in November 2023. More specifically, I used the time to start my research on ‘monstrous mycelium’, hoping to unpack some of the fissures and continuities across the recent explosion of fungal representations in contemporary culture. Many with even a passing interest in that third strange taxonomical kingdom will be aware of the stunning visual representations in recent years, perhaps most notably HBO’s The Last of Us, but a quick Google search throws up endless blog posts and media articles about the recent trend of ‘mushroom horror’ and its historical forebears; lists of contemporary fiction that feature fungal representations in horrific or disturbing ways; and a growing number of academic book chapters and scholarly articles appearing on the subject. For me, fungi encapsulate that precise intersection between the ecological and the monstrous, as beings that are hard to categorise and contain, with unfamiliar ways of being and knowing, that can be interpreted both as a threat and a radical alternative to Anthropocentric subjectivity, control, and dominance. Beyond that, I was curious see if any of these contemporary fungal narratives were exploring themes of environmental damage or ecodegradation specifically, alongside the more familiar tale of psycho-corporeal invasion.  

Several of the Greenhouse colleagues I met in Stavanger said it was a shame my visit hadn’t coincided with Norway’s mushroom picking season; there had been trips only a few weeks prior out to the forests and hilltops of the surrounding Jæren region (known in the tourist literature as the Edge of Norway). Instead, I would have to make do with the Fungi board game kept in the Greenhouse library, quipped Finn Arne Jørgensen, Professor of Environmental History at Stavanger and co-director of the Greenhouse centre with Professor Dolly Jørgensen, the brilliant environmental historian and extinction scholar. Both Dolly and Finn Arne were incredibly hospitable during my stay, and I did, in fact, get the opportunity to sample their vast board game collection, notably the fantastically complicated ecologically themed card game called Forest Shuffle, at which I was roundly beaten by everyone involved. 

This is just one example of the warm and welcoming community I encountered in the Greenhouse. When I first arrived at the department (the environmental humanities department, a whole department), Dolly led me around and introduced me to the whole team, the professors and the well-paid post docs, the interns and the PhDs. When asked about my research here, my answer prompted further questions, but ones directed by understanding and familiarity with the topic: “Will you be incorporating much Anna Tsing into your talk?” “Have you read Gaia Giuliani’s Anthropocene monster book?” “If you’re thinking of Mexican Gothic, we have Rocio Gomez’s book on silver mining in Mexico in the Greenhouse library.” Even if their interest in monsters was minimal, there was an implicit understanding of why monstrosity might be important for ecocriticism and were keen to listen to my thoughts on the topic either way. This is not to suggest that good research comes from surrounding yourself with sympathetic listeners or affirming assumptions (although finding the evaluative and critical arguments to support these is also important), but more that to feel that you are in an environment of sympathetic support, that those around you might share an understanding of the broader implications of thinking through narratives and metaphors and what they may betray about how we relate to the world around us, is enormously stimulating. It’s the same feeling I get at the Bristol CEH, but with the added bonus of that community having a physical space in which to come together, share ideas, and pursue ongoing conversations.  

 

A cross-section of the Greenhouse library

The nucleus of that space is the small (but mighty!) library, which collects together an impressive number of resources the centre has built up over the past few years. Although I was familiar with lots of the books already, this was the result of painstaking bibliography-building over the past two years – and here they all were! In one place! More importantly, the library offers free coffee, providing essential caffeine and water-cooler vibes, at times a welcome reprieve from the solitude (but also, oh so peaceful and distraction-free environment) of my very own office – a considerable luxury for a PhD student. Having my own space to think and write meant I got more done in just under four weeks than I would in thrice the time at home, but the regular roster of events also gave me plenty of opportunities to get to know my colleagues: an online book talk every Monday, a research seminar on Wednesday afternoons, the ‘official’ department lunch every Thursday. There was also a loose arrangement that whoever was hungry at 12pm (rarely me, considering the three-course hotel breakfast I forced down each morning – who could resist such a resplendent feast, at no additional cost, in a country where a loaf of bread could set you back £3.50??) would find an assortment of other envirohums colleagues in the department canteen, happily munching their sandwiches.  

All of this culminated in a real atmosphere of collegiality. This is no doubt down to the talents and dedication of Dolly and Finn Arne, who must spend hours tracking down  authors for their book talks, hosting and recording them, organising research talks, fellowships, projects, syllabi; but it is also due to a sense of commitment in the wider team, to make time, to show up, to share progresses, opportunities, frustrations. The result is an ability to have ongoing dialogue about the broader concern that unites them all together: the mediations and conceptualisations of the environment – natural, built, societal, bodily – in the humanities. It allows for organic connections, mutual investment, and genuine intellectual and emotional connection. This is especially important for still-emerging disciplines, but it’s a feeling all academics know from conferences and symposia, where you can skip the explanations and get down to the nitty gritty of your research area. All in all, it gives you a much better sense of ‘what is known’ in the community, what questions are being asked, what conversations are being had.  

This is not, for a moment, to suggest that my colleagues at Bristol – nor those at other British universities – are less dedicated. Far from it. However, I suspect it is a question of resources: fiscal, which inevitably correlates with temporal and emotional. I know the postgraduates are paid a much better wage – and this may certainly translate into higher event attendance. For what it has to work with, the Bristol CEH does very well, and it is keen to learn from more established communities like those in Stavanger. Last term, the CEH began offering a version of the Greenhouse Thursday Lunch – a Wednesday coffee social held in the arts complex staff common room, 11am-12pm, where colleagues can come together for a regular catch up, to try and strengthen that sense community that I – and certainly many other ‘strange fellows’ of the interdisciplinary type – have already benefitted from at the Bristol CEH. I would encourage those who have time to come along and help us build a strong communal atmosphere that will see the research centre continue to flourish.  

When it came time to give my research talk on ‘Monstrous Mycelium’ at the end of the month, I was buoyed to be speaking to a crowd (I say crowd: we’re talking departmental research seminar, it was hardly Wembley) of friendly and familiar faces. Faces I’d eaten lunch with many times over the 28-day period. Faces who I’d join in drinking £10 pints with later that week, to celebrate what, I think, was a successful talk. New faces, including that of the renowned monster scholar Ingvil Hellstrand, who made the time to come and listen to my monstrous ramblings – what a humbling treat. For the talk itself, far from the extensive critique of a contemporary mycelial genre I’d pictured, I ended up doing a kind of open-ended comparison of mushroom imagery in Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Anna Tsing’s ‘Testimony of a Spore’, asking how fungal characteristics are made to do different theoretical and affective work in each. Although I ended up probing Tsing’s, and other envirohums scholars’, valorisation of the fungus as a theoretical and sociopolitical tool for the ongoing deAnthropocentering project, I can certainly understand its allure. When environments of collaboration and spaces of ongoing networking are supported, stunning Greenhouses can grow.  

Wintry hike up Dalsnuten, across the fjord from Stavanger

Workshop: Environmental Humanities Working With Artists (23 Feb)

Posted on by adrian.howkins

Friday 23 February 2024

10:15am – 4:30pm

Meet outside Spike Island Gallery, 133 Cumberland Road,BS5 6UX

 

Spend a day off-site at Spike Island Gallery, home to eightystudios, to engage with artists in their workspace and discuss artist projects in the public realm. Through a series of artist encounters and studio visits, we will look into variations of artist projects from public art to research collaborations. We will explore the possibilities when working on collaborative projects with artists as well as how artwork can engage with audiences.

The day will include studio visits with artists Jackson+Harris, Katy Connor and designer Jono Lewarne, visits to the exhibitions by Young In Hong and Olu Ogunnaike and workshops exploring approaches to collaborative projects and funding. The day will conclude with an introduction to artist film.

Notes and Handouts will be provided.

Working with Artists

Posted on by paul.merchant

One of our Centre for Environmental Humanities speakers last academic year was Eben Kirksey, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford. Among the themes he addressed in his talk was the value of integrating art and artists into environmental humanities research. Many of the members of our Centre already do this, and some members are artists themselves. For those of us who don’t already work with artists, it can be a little daunting to know where to start. Putting these two things together – the benefits of working with artists and the practical challenges of getting started – was the motivation behind inviting Georgia Hall to lead a day-long workshop on working with artists for the CEH in October 2023. Georgia is a curator from Bristol currently working in Switzerland who has extensive experience in supporting the facilitation of artist-academic collaborations.

 

The workshop aimed to share experiences of artist / academic projects & collaborations discuss learning and ways of working with artists and discover new ways of working with artists through sharing tips and considerations. The workshop began in the morning in the humanities research space at the University of Bristol. Georgia began by providing an overview of three different artistic collaborations she has been involved with, including Linda Brothwell’s Tools for Tea project in Knowle West, Earth Art Gallery, Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol and Art of the Anthropocene project at LSE. We then spent some time exploring the nature of these collaborations. There are broadly three types of collaboration between artists and academics.

  • The first is where an academic approaches an artist to commission a piece of work based on a scholarship that has already been done.
  • The second is where an artist seeks information from an academic about a particular topic to inform their practice.
  • The third is a genuine partnership between an artist and an academic on a common project where the output is uncertain at the start and where the potential exists for real collaborative creativity.

None of these types of collaboration is fundamentally ‘better’ than the others, but Georgia stressed that it is important to be honest about the nature of the relationship from the beginning of a project. We then did a short exercise based on academic collaboration to explore these different forms of collaboration.

 

As part of this exercise, we considered the importance of all parties having a clear set of expectations about what they want to achieve through the collaboration and aligning these as far as possible. This process of alignment can be challenging, as different ‘outputs’ or results can be valued differently in different professional contexts, but it’s important to take time to ensure that all parties feel a sense of ownership over the process and its results. These differences in approach can also be a productive source of new ideas and creative thinking. For instance, one potential collaboration in the morning exercise explored how theoretical academic discussions about the representation or ‘figuration’ of alternative ecological futures could be reshaped by engaging with artistic representations of these futures.

 

In the afternoon we walked to Spike Island art gallery where we were given a short introduction to the Ofelia Rodríguez Talking in Dreams exhibition displaying a selection of over 70 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures made over the past five decades. Displaying a combination of found objects and images rich in symbolism to construct humorous yet critical works that examine cultural identity and gender stereotypes, influenced by memories of Rodríguez’s native Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The group then discussed their impressions and reflections on the work.

We then continued the workshop in the associate’s research space. As Georgia suggested, it was a powerful experience to be taken out of our academic surroundings and spend the afternoon surrounded by working artists, demonstrating that collaborating with artists is not the same as collaborating with other academics.

We spent some time discussing some of the practical elements of these kinds of collaboration: It is important to pay artists for their time in the initial design phase of a joint project; an artist may not always be the best person to ‘tell the story’ of their artistic practice so hiring somebody to focus on outreach can be beneficial. Questions were raised about how academics might approach an artist and how they could verify the quality and impact of their work without prior knowledge of their work. This led to a conversation around being continually engaged in the arts as well as working with a trained curator or producer who would advise on contemporary art practice.

An important point that ran throughout the day is that the work of artists is itself research, and to get the most out of collaborations research must be given space to flourish.

 

Adrian Howkins, Milo Newman, Paul Merchant & Georgia Hall

 

Remembering Rockpools

Posted on by paul.merchant

Ursula Glendinning, MA student in English

What do rockpools mean to us? How do we remember them? How might the act of looking into tidal pools help us to engage mindfully with the non-human world? These are just a few of the questions raised by Suzannah V. Evans’s workshop on rockpool poetry held in early November. 

Byssus: Amazon.co.uk: Jen Hadfield: 9781447241102: Books

 

We are sat in a small room in the Folkhouse, just off Park Street in Bristol, surrounded by various volumes of poetry that focus on coastal environments and, in particular, rockpools. Next to each seat is a shell: razor clams, scallops, dog whelks, even an Iceland cyprine, are dotted along the perimeter of the table. 

I have come here to learn more about how to write the strange creatures of tidal pools – an interest recently discovered whilst reading for an introductory seminar earlier this year. The works of Isabel Galleymore, Mary Oliver, Jen Hadfield, and many others, have inspired a bit of an obsession and, encouraged by my lecturers, I have found and am now attending a rockpool poetry workshop.  

Each of us holds a shell in our hand and, closing our eyes, we see with our fingers – exploring the tactile pleasure of running our thumbs over smooth indentations and jagged edges. Suzannah asks us to construct our own rockpool, and in a large bowl intended to hold planted flowers, we ritualistically scatter sand, and place, within the nest of stone, the shells we have been cradling. Each of us pours in a bit of water, chanting the words we have chosen to describe the shells – smooth, winged, serrated, meditative. We laugh and regret the placement of a tinfoil sardine: the concoction admittedly looks a bit like a fish stew.  

 

Ostensibly, the rockpool is a site of extraction. Most of us have childhood memories of picking through the residents of these watery worlds. Which one is the biggest? The shiniest? The most colourful? But the workshop, and my subsequent studies, helped me to see the ethics of rockpooling beyond this perspective. Careful attention to rockpools changes our physical positionality as observers. Rather than looking up at a mountain, gearing for an excursion and eventual conquest, the participant must stoop until they are almost level with the water’s surface. The practice invites a meditative state, a quietness; we sit and observe, asking for nothing in return. 

However, rockpooling is an increasingly endangered pastime. Throughout the workshop, I, and the other attendees, were uncomfortably aware of the emerging threat to rockpools and coastal life in general. We spoke of rising sea levels, loss of species, and shorelines used, abused, and neglected until they become places of rot and pollution. The poems we produced contained an aroma of nostalgia as well as barely stifled anger for these increasingly depleted habitats.  

My current project involves a study of the liveliness of dead crabs in modern and contemporary poetry, looking at May Swenson, Mark Doty and more. I intend to explore how these poets represent the animacies of decay through the speakers’ exploration of intertidal regions. The poems I have chosen are achingly sensual and balance both profound sadness and wonder. Suzannah V. Evan’s workshop provided a vital foundation for this exploration, and I am grateful to have been given the opportunity by Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities to further my new obsession with rockpools alongside her and the other participants.  

CfP // The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies

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Call for Papers

The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies

4 & 5 April 2024, University of Amsterdam | Deadline for proposals: 15 October 2023.

Keynote Speaker:

Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Duke University Press, 2017)

 

For this two-day, single-stream, and in-person conference, sponsored by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Dutch Research Council, scholars are invited to explore how the human and nonhuman forces shaping and emerging from the earth are articulated in art and cultural practice.

 

If the earth was once passed off as a neutral backdrop to human life, in the present age of ecological derangement it has reemerged as fraught with relations of power and politics. In this context, cultural theorists have put forward the rubric of geopower to conceptualize the ways that power is exerted over and through but also by the earth (Clare 2013; Neyrat 2019; Yusoff 2018). Having long been entangled with extractive, racial capitalism (Bain 2023, 1-2), geopower is becoming especially visible amid climate change and discourses of the Anthropocene. From proposals for solar geoengineering to legislation extending legal personhood to ecological entities such as the Ganga River, contemporary manifestations of geopower indicate how politics and planetarity are colliding in complex ways that are increasingly defining the present and will shape the future.

Extrapolated from Michel Foucault’s thinking of biopower, geopower—or “geontopower” in Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s alternative formulation (2016)—has been theorized along several overlapping trajectories (Tola 2022; Luisetti 2019). For some, it primarily signifies the “government of the earth” (Diran & Traisnel 2019, 44) and implicates the technologies and tactics through which dominant subjects frame and exploit not just terrestrial environments but those “defined into nature” under patriarchal and colonial orders (Caputi 2020, 183). For another strand of theory, which draws on posthuman philosophies of life and matter (esp. Grosz 2008), geopower names the nonhuman forces of the earth, which permeate, condition, but also often disrupt or imperil humanly regulated environments (Clark 2011; Grosz, Yusoff, & Clark 2017).

Building on these developments, this conference explores how geopower intersects with aesthetics, taken expansively as referring to art, film, literature, and other forms of cultural practice, as well as sensed materiality and embodied perception. Our premise is that the aesthetic, far from being secondary or supplemental to the forces shaping the earth, is centrally entailed and embedded in dynamics of geopower. This can be seen in the visual construction of “the Earth system” as an object of calculation, conservation, and control, or in scholarly, literary, and filmic narratives of the Anthropocene, which cast different human subjects as planetary culprits or custodians (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016). The earth’s inhuman forces, meanwhile, have a transgressive vitality that often registers aesthetically and might be articulated in artistic practice (Sheikh 2017). Such forces suffuse cultural practice even when not explicitly thematized, whether because some artistic scenes are economically aligned with particular regimes of resource extraction (Acosta 2020) or because cultural works are necessarily composed of planetary materialities, which precede and exceed discursive or authorial framings of the aesthetic (Parikka 2015).

To probe the connections among power, planetarity, and the aesthetic, we call on scholars, critics, and practitioners across disciplines to reflect on how diverse formations of geopower are enabled and mediated, but also challenged in cultural practice. How do conceptual, visual, poetic, or narratological framings of the earth calibrate social approaches to environments? Which marginalized perspectives can be brought forward to develop alternative representations or counter-histories of geopower? How is it imbricated with racializing, (neo)colonial, and cisheteropatriarchal orders? And how might theories of geopower be rethought by attending to its material manifestations or reimagined in literary and artistic experiment?

In addressing these and other questions pertaining to the aesthetics of geopower, contributors are invited to explore narratives, images, and practices relating to any genre or medium, or events, discourses, and materialities in any historical and geographical context. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

—cross-cultural perspectives on/representations of the earth as an aesthetic object;

—the significance of land and planetary forces in decolonial thought and practice;

—the aesthetics of geoengineering, from speculation to design;

—climate fiction and narrative constructions of geopower;

—articulations of the earth’s materialities in the arts and cultural practice;

—the role of mapping, remote sensing, and technological mediation in planetary governance;

—the politics and aesthetics of “deep time” imaginaries;

—Embodied and multi-sensory apprehensions of planetary power;

—representations of resource extraction and new commodity frontiers;

—the aestheticization of planetary forces that exceed and transcend the human;

—creative interventions that make visible the inequities and injustices of geopower.

 

Submission

Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words for 20 minute presentations) and a short biographical note (max. 250 words) to aestheticsgeopower@gmail.com by 15 October 2023.

Kindly send submissions as a single pdf document of max. two pages. To deepen mutual engagement, papers will be circulated a week before the conference; each participant will be assigned a respondent and asked to act as primary respondent to an assigned paper in return. Selected papers will be invited for inclusion in an edited volume. No conference fees will be charged.

Organized by Dr Simon Ferdinand (www.simonferdinand.com) and Dr Colin Sterling (www.colinsterling.com) of the University of Amsterdam.

 

References

Acosta, Santiago, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, 1973-1983 (PhD. dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 2020).

Bain, Kimberly, “Black Soil,” Social Text 41.1 (2023): 1-19.

Bonneuil, Christrophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2016).

Caputi, Jane, Call Your “Mutha”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Clare, Stephanie, “Geopower: The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz Fanon’s Writing,” Diacritics 41.4 (2013): 60-80.

Clark, Nigel, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: Sage, 2010).

Diran, Ingrid, and Antoine Traisnel, “The Birth of Geopower,” Diacritics 47.3 (2019): 32-51.

Grosz, Elizabeth, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Grosz, Elizabeth, Kathryn Yusoff, and Nigel Clark, “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical,” Theory, Culture, & Society 34. 2-3 (2017): 129-46.

Luisetti, Federico, “Geopower: On the States of Nature of Late Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 22.3 (2018): 342-63.

Neyrat, Frédéric, The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

Parikka, Jussi, “Earth Forces: Contemporary Land Arts, Technology, and New Materialist Aesthetics,” Cultural Studies Review 21.2 (2015): 47-75.

Povinelli, Elizabth A., Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

Sheikh, Shela,“Translating Geontologies” inAnd Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency: Essays on the Occasion of Trump’s Inauguration, edited James Graham (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017), pp. 165-184

Tola, Miriam, “Geopower: Genealogies, Territories, and Politics,” in Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics, edited by Luigi Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi, and Viviana Asara (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022), pp. 564-76.

Yusoff, Kathryn, “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower,” in Handbook on the Geographies of Power, edited by Mat Coleman and John Agnew (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 203-16.

Making amidst extinction: a call for creative practices

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Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol & online, November 2, 2023

How to engage in world making across species? How to work toward world making that enhances the lives of others? And how to do all this in the time of extinctions, knowing, as we must, that we are living amidst the ruination of others?

—Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (2011)

Growing awareness of massive biotic diminishment and the accompanying large-scale loss of biological and cultural diversity has led to a surge in academic interest into what has become known as the sixth mass extinction. Centred around the emergent field of critical extinction studies, this concern seeks to establish ‘an interdisciplinary, biocultural approach that can attend to the plural phenomena and entangled significance of extinction’.[i] Broadly speaking, this field comprises humanities and social sciences (including but certainly not limited to the academic fields of ecocriticism, human geography, environmental history and philosophy, cultural studies, and multispecies anthropology) and researches the ways in which the sixth extinction is perceived, experienced, and narrated among different communities and individuals. Defining an expressive mode for this work, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren write that storytelling ‘is one of the great arts of witness, and in these difficult times telling lively stories is a deeply committed project, one of engaging with the multitudes of others in their noisy, fleshy living and dying’.[ii] Stories, in their most generous interpretation, Rose writes, ‘have the potential to promote understandings of embodied, relational, contingent ethics’ and can ‘pull readers into ethical proximity’.[iii] This raises the following questions: who is able to join this deeply committed project of telling stories, and what kind of stories are told? Dealing with unprecedented loss, the stories currently told are often driven by a strong elegiac impulse.[iv] As the Australian poet John Kinsella writes in response to the extinction of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle: ‘What family / will post your obituary — trapped / in descriptors and comparatives, analogies / and desperate metaphors?’[v] But there are many ways to tell stories, and these are certainly not limited to the spoken and written word.

Auk eggs installation at the Kelp Store, Papa Westray. Photograph is copyright Milo Newman, 2022
Auk eggs installation, Kelp Store, Papa Westray. Photograph © Milo Newman, 2022

In this light, this call for creative practices aims to gather together myriad other modes of expression concerned with extinction and the ways in which biocultural loss affects more-than-human communities. In doing so it seeks to explore alternate modes of telling these extinction stories beyond the elegiac, and beyond the confines of the academic journal or book. Our interest in creative practices here is a broad one, encompassing a range of different mediums, approaches, and forms of creativity. It is about art-making as a process, not just as an outcome; a way for practitioners, researchers, or academics to explore different ways of knowing. Our concern is therefore with the doings of art. We want to explore what ‘“work” art does in the world’ in context of extinction, what it can set in motion.[vi] We think that art does far more here than simply help promote understanding, foster engagement or raise awareness. Instead, we want to explore how (or if!) a plurality of individual creative responses expressing personal emotional, ethical, poetic, critical, and many other reactions to biocultural loss are quietly (or even loudly) involved in the production of new worlds, knowledges, and subjectivities.[vii] To help us explore these ideas we invite contributions from artists, writers, activists, and academics (both individuals and collectives) that seek to make connections between creative practices and biotic diminishment, biodiversity loss, or extinction. While the symposium itself focuses on creative practice, other reflections on extinction are also welcome. We hope to publish some of the work resulting from this event at a later stage. Proposals may include:

  • Written texts, both fiction and nonfiction (4500–5000 words)
  • Poetry (up to five poems)
  • Artworks
  • Film
  • Performance
  • Artistic interventions/reflections/provocations (3500-4000 words)

The symposium will be hybrid. Registration is free; lunch (vegan only) will be provided. Please let us know if you have any allergies.

Please submit abstracts and/or short proposals (300 words, with accompanying images—max. 3—as necessary) to e.tabak@bristol.ac.uk and milo.newman@bristol.ac.uk by 31 August, 2023. While work is welcome in any language, we ask that the presentations and abstracts are in English. Please include a short bio for each contributor. Selected contributors will be notified by September 15, 2023.

This event is generously supported by the Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities.

[i] Matthew Chrulew and Rick De Vos, ‘Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding’, Cultural Studies Review 25.1 (2019): 23–28, 24.

[ii] Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds’, Environmental Humanities 8.1 (2016): 77–94, 91.

[iii] Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Slowly ~ Writing into the Anthropocene’, TEXT 20 (2013): 1–14.

[iv] Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

[v] John Kinsella, ‘Not the Postage Stamp of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle!’, Red Room Poetry (2020).

[vi] Harriet Hawkins, For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds (Milton Park & New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 6.

[vii] Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation (London: Palgrave, 2009).

Environmental Humanities in Antarctica

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In this blog post, Dr Adrian Howkins, programme director of the new MA Environmental Humanities, discusses how his research on Antarctica brings crucial humanities perspectives to Antarctic research, and how this approach is embedded in the new MA programme.

Field camp at Lake Fryxell in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
Field camp at Lake Fryxell in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica by Eli Duke CC-SA 2.0

Since the late-1950s the McMurdo Dry Valleys have become a major centre for Antarctic science. As an environmental historian, I have been able to contribute novel forms of ‘data’ to the scientific understanding of the region, such as using Captain Scott’s diaries to understand environmental change over the past 120 years.  As a historian, I am also well-placed to ask questions related to themes such as political power, social relations, ideas about conservation, and connections to global themes.

I am currently working with a geographer and a glaciologist to write a co-authored book on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.  Some of our major findings support the fact that a human and historical dimension to conservation is vital.  These include:

  • The science taking place in the McMurdo Dry Valleys is used by national programmes to support their political interests in Antarctica. The US flag, for example, flies proudly from the Lake Hoare scientific field camp, offering a powerful refutation of New Zealand sovereignty claims to the region.  This means that successful conservation needs to take into account the geopolitical implications of environmental management.
  • The past 30-years have seen an increase in gender equality among scientists working in the McMurdo Dry Valley. Female scientists who may previously have been put off research in the region by its highly masculine culture, now make major contributions to the scientific work. The number of scientific publications on the region has increased significantly during the recent period, suggesting that greater gender equality may help to promote a productive scientific culture.
  • Traditional approaches to environmental management don’t always take humanities-focused values into account. For example, the value of ‘wilderness’ is often taken for granted, while our work shows that some countries working in the region (e.g. Japan) do not always share these values.  By raising questions about the goals of conservation and the cultural values behind them, our work calls for more focus on the human dimensions of Antarctic conservation.
  • Our work in the McMurdo Dry Valleys exemplify many of the themes and trends associated with the proposed new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. Work in the region is made possible by carbon intensive technologies such as helicopters and ATVs, while at the same time, scientific work in the region highlights the consequences of anthropogenic climate heating.  Lake levels in the region, for example, have risen by over 16m since the time of Captain Scott as a consequence of more meltwater flowing from the alpine glaciers during the relatively warm summer months.
  • Through our historical research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, we not only hope to make a contribution to the scientific understanding, but also to make the region a model for interdisciplinary research involving the environmental humanities in other parts of the world.

Our work suggests that many of the challenges facing the McMurdo Dry Valleys – and the Antarctic continent more generally, and even the rest of the world – cannot be successfully addressed without taking into account perspectives traditionally studied by humanities scholarship.  Such work requires a willingness to take a collaborative approach and be open to different approaches and practical skills.  As authors, we hope to model this ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ not only in our book on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, but also in our teaching.  The new MA in environmental humanities at the University of Bristol, for example, has a strong element of collaborative and interdisciplinary training and is underpinned by activities in Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Find out more about MA Environmental Humanities at Bristol

Dr Adrian Howkins is Reader in Environmental History at the University of Bristol.