Alice Beck from the Department of Human Geography, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, has reviewed Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds in a recent issue of Cultural Geographies.

She describes it as "a compelling read with intriguing case studies that give an insightful exploration of the exciting possibilities that MtH-PR could offer."

Read the full review here.

A call for papers of interest to those working on more-than-human participatory research:

Avoiding Ecocidal Smart Cities: Participatory Design for More-than-Human Futures
A workshop at the Participatory Design Conference – PDC 2018
20-24 August 2018, Hasselt & Genk, Belgium

http://pd4more.urbaninformatics.net

Submissions open until 14 May 2018 (extended from 02 May!)

Many early adopters of sustainable smart city technology employed a technocratic approach. The dominant visions of these future cities, such as in the “eco smart city” [19], address environmental sustainability through the optimisation and rationalisation of urban processes, making them more efficient and therefore more sustainable. However, critics claim that such approaches are too simplistic, are unable to deal with the complexities of real, messy cities [19] and perform sustainability in specific ways that leave little room for participation and citizen agency [7,11,19]. Furthermore, the technocratic approach limited the actual social benefit people could expect from their urban habitat, and this has led to a participatory turn in smart cities [e.g. [1,12]. For example, many local governments have started using human-centred and participatory design for the integration of technology in urban environments to address issues of sustainability.

However, the turn to participation within smart cities fails to address a human-exceptionalist notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only. Within the age of the Anthropocene – a term used to refer to a new geological era in which human activity is transforming earth systems [16], accelerating climate change and causing mass extinctions [18] – a human-centred perspective is increasingly seen as untenable. In fields such as STS [10,13], environmental humanities [15,17], geography [2,21], planning [16], design [5,8,25] and HCI [24], scholars are expanding and challenging traditional binaries of Western thought such as City/Nature, Human/Non-human, to consider the entanglements between human and nonhuman worlds including in urban contexts, and the ways in which we can conduct participatory research in morethan- human worlds, in order to overcome problematic narratives of human privilege and exceptionalism.

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to move the field of participatory design for sustainable smart cities forward by bringing together designers, practitioners, and researchers to explore what it means to co-design genuinely sustainable cities that take into account the ways in which cities and nature, and humans and non-humans are interrelated and interdependent, for the co-creation of environmentally and socially just postanthropocentric cities. We aim to develop new conceptions that move away from traditional binaries and open up new possibilities for thinking about participatory design for urban environments in hybrid digital-physical space. We also aim to explore practical ideas about how more-than-human perspectives can shape actual participatory design practices and policies related to cities. For example, we might explore design responses to new legal rights of non-humans such as trees and rivers [20] and how their participation is negotiated in urban processes in hybrid digitalphysical space [4].

Workshop Topics of Interests
The topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to the following:
..  Participatory design and use of smart cities, urban informatics and IoT technologies that explore human/morethan- human relations;
..  Methodological approaches, including opportunities and challenges for designing in more-than-human worlds;
..  Speculative designs, design fictions, and art projects;
..  Ethical and legal considerations, e.g. design responses to a new legal status of nature;
..  Designs that decentre the human or privilege other species;
..  Cultural aspects of sustainable smart cities in this space;
..  Theoretical perspectives from the literature e.g. Anthropocene, Capitalocene [18], Chthulucene [13], and;
..  “World-making”, what could a more-than-human city be?

Audience
We welcome researchers and practitioners working on design cases, prototype development and artistic installations, as well as those working on theoretical, critical, legal, or ethical perspectives, including those from STS, environmental humanities, and other disciplines. We welcome methodological contributions, such as object-oriented ontology [3], non-human ethnographies [22], speculative design, and actor-network and assemblage theories related to decentring the human in design.

Submission Instructions
Participants are asked to contribute to the workshop with a position paper or research note, which introduces aspects of the participant’s prior research, future plans, insights, or interests in the area, as well as a short biography (200 words). The max. length of workshop position papers is 2,000 words. Please only submit DOC, DOCX, or PDF files ensuring the file size is below 5MB. Please submit your paper by email to Marcus Foth at m.foth [AT] qut.edu.au

Submission deadline: 14 May 2018

The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organisers for relevance. Our workshop venue capacity is 40. If participants exceed places, we will choose a balance of different perspectives on the workshop topic.

Workshop Organisers
Sara Heitlinger, Newcastle University, UK
Marcus Foth, QUT Design Lab, Australia
Rachel Clarke, Northumbria University, UK
Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Ann Light, University of Sussex, UK
Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

Full list of references available at:
http://pd4more.urbaninformatics.net/cfp/

We are please to announce that an edited collection, arising from this project, will be published with Routledge in December of this year. Called Participatory Research in More-than-human Worlds it provides examples of more-than-human participatory research, and brings current research on non-humans into conversation with a range of influential texts in PR. Please consider ordering a copy through your library!

• Introduction
  • More-than-human participatory research: contexts, challenges, possibilities | Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones, Niamh Moore, Emma Roe
• Part 1: Experiments in more-than-human participatory research
  • 1. Towards a more-than-human participatory research | Michelle Bastian
  • 2. Marginalised voices: zoömusicology through a participatory lens | Hollis Taylor
  • 3. ‘Animal-computer interaction: a manifesto’ (2011) and sections from ‘Towards an animal-centred ethics for Animal–Computer Interaction’ (2016)  | Clara Mancini
  • 4. Transformations of time on ecological pilgrimage | Peter Reason
• Part 2: Building (tentative) affinities
  • 5. How we nose | Timothy Hodgetts and Hester
  • 6. An apprenticeship in plant thinking | Hannah Pitt
  • 7. Imagination and empathy – Eden3: Plein Air | Reiko Goto Collins and Timothy Martin Collins
  • 8. Empowerment as skill: the role of affect in building new subjectivities | Anna Krzywoszynska
  • 9. Shadows, undercurrents and the Aliveness Machines | Jon Pigott and Antony Lyons
• Part 3: Cautions
  • 10. Laboratory beagles and affective co-productions of knowledge | Eva Giraud and Gregory Hollin
  • 11. Rethinking ethnobotany? a methodological reflection on human-plant research | Jennifer Atchison and Lesley Head
  • 12. Con-versing: listening, speaking, turning | Deirdre Heddon

​ACI2016: Third International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction
16th-17th November 2016, Milton Keynes, UK
www.aci2016.org 
#aci2016conf

In recent years an increasing body of work from within the interaction design community has been shaping the emerging field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), with a focus on:

1. studying the interaction between animals and technology in naturalistic settings, around specific animal activities or interspecies relations;
2. developing user-centered technology that can improve animals’ welfare and support animals in their activities;
3. informing user-centered approaches to the design of technology intended for animals, by systematically exploring, adapting and evaluating theoretical and methodological frameworks and protocols derived from both interaction design and animal science.

Building on a series of ACI events (SIG meeting at CHI2012, workshops at NordiCHI2014 and BHCI2015, symposia at AISB2014 and MB2016, 1st and 2nd congress at ACE2014 and ACE2015), to advance this area of research and practice, and to support the emergence of ACI as an academic discipline, ACI2016 will be held for the first time as an independent conference and will take place at The Open University (OU), which is home to the OU’s Animal-Computer Interaction Lab.

We welcome contributions originating from any discipline related to ACI, and describing work within diverse contexts. We specifically invite the submission of: 

• long and short papers (due 19th June)
• workshop proposals (due 10th July)
• doctoral consortium abstracts (due 18th September)
• video posters and demos (due 18th September)

Contributions are encouraged in relation to any of the following topics:

• Design - interaction modalities that may need to be developed in order to make technology accessible to other animals; novel designs for users with different sensorial apparatuses, cognitive capabilities, and ergonomic characteristics; multisensory interfaces and alternative interactional paradigms appropriate for ACI; design solutions developed within ACI applications that could inform design within HCI.
• Methodology - methodological frameworks enabling animals to actively participate in the design process as legitimate stakeholders, contributors and users; HCI methodologies that can be called upon when designing with animals or investigating how technology affects them and their interactions with humans; methodologies that can be adapted from HCI or derived from other disciplines; more-than-human approaches developed within ACI that could contribute to HCI practices.
• Theory - main challenges that ACI researchers may encounter in conceptualizing the interaction between humans, animals and technology; ways of interpreting the outcomes of applied studies, concrete designs and research practices to articulate such interactions; existing theoretical frameworks from HCI, animal science, or other disciplines, that ACI theories can draw from or contribute to.
• Ethics - legitimate technological applications for ACI; implications of ACI’s animal-centered perspective for conducting research that involves animal participants; ethical frameworks that may or may not be suitable to support the development of ACI; relation between ethics and methodology in ACI; potential influence of ACI ethics on ethical aspects of HCI research.
• Applications - ACI applications that can improve animal welfare or human-animal practices in a range of contexts; animal technologies that do or do not constitute good examples of or models for ACI.

Life's Journey on the Torridge is a film from the Boat Stories project, which is described as "a series of ten short documentary films about people whose lives revolve around fishing and working boats in northern Devon". This particular film focuses on Dave Gabe who was our skipper on the In conversation with water workshop. You can read more about the making of the film, or just watch it below.  


Thanks to Antony Lyons for the heads up. 

We have a really exciting group of international and local scholars looking at the construction of boundaries and interfaces between human and non-human 'knowers'; creative co-production of place with non-humans; issues to do with communication and representation; embodied entanglements between human and non-human and challenging the positionality of the one who 'knows'.

Come along on Wednesday. We'll be in Electrical Engineering Building, Room 403a, Sessions 1 through 4.

You can find out more about each session below:

Session One: More-than-Human Bodily Entanglements: Boundaries, Interfaces, Knowers with presentations from @eva_faerycake, Gregory Hollin, Anna Krzywoszynska, Sophie Lewis, @SandySom

Session Two: (Not) Seeing, Hearing, Showing Non-Humans with presentations from @DrJennyA, @ProfLesleyHead, Michael Gallagher, Erin Despard, Timothy Hodgetts, @routesandroots,

Session Three: Co-producing place with non-humans with presentations from @ecoartnotes, @FelicityPicken, Antony Lyons, Jon Pigott, Jacob Shell

Session Four: Who Knows?: relocating participatory knowledges across human/non-human divides with presentations by @mhbastian, Skye Naslund, Felice Wyndham, @ollyzanetti

Hope to meet some of you there! If not, I'm sure there'll be some live tweeting going on.

Michelle Bastian

Public Science Project CUNY, New York, May 2nd 2014.

This international workshop will explore the roles played in participatory democracy by forms of agency that exceed the boundaries of the conventional individual subject, including the non-human and the non-living. We invite contributions exploring unconventional forms of agency in participatory practice, or which introduce experimental methods, concepts and projects for doing so.

Questions of empowerment and voice are central to all forms of participatory politics and research. But what happens when we attune ourselves to forms of agency that exceed the boundaries of the conventional liberal subject? Recent materialist approaches to agency and subjectivity have done much to reconfigure concepts of political community in ways that recognize the active political agency of animals, ecosystems, intra-psychic and trans-psychic entities, the dead, the yet-to-be-born, and objects, technologies and laws (Bennett, 2010; Honig, 2012; Latour & Weibel, 2005). An increasing number of aesthetic practices, similarly, are reconfiguring the arts as ‘co-collaborations’ between human and non-human agency (Barrett & Bolt, 2013; Morton, 2013). How, then, are we to listen to political actors that do not possess a conventional ‘voice’? And what might the role of ‘more-than-human’ agencies be in creating more egalitarian forms of democratic authority (Whatmore, 2002)?

The workshop will bring together diverse perspectives on 'worldings' in which distinct subjects, objects and publics are brought into novel alignments (Ranciere, 2004; Barad; 2007). The workshop – part of a collaboration between CUNY’s Public Science Project, Plymouth University, UK, and Johns Hopkins University, and facilitated by the Authority Research Network  – will be structured through a combination of presentations and discussion sessions. Example topics include (but are not limited to):

• Participatory engagements with the non-human and/or the non-living;
• The role of non-conventional forms of agency in democratic politics;
• The legitimation of authority to speak ‘for’, or ‘on behalf of’, non-human or  non-living ‘others’;
• Theoretical approaches to non-human political agency, including new materialisms, assemblage theory, actor-network theory, speculative realism, hauntology, pragmatism, post-structuralist political theory and appreciative inquiry;
• Artistic collaborations between human and non-human agency;
• Engagement within and across the conventional subject – voices, psychotic figures/imaginaries, multiple selves, collectives, communities, mobs and movements;
• Collaborations with past and future generations;
• The agencies of food, drink, drugs and medications;
• Innovative multi-sensory methods (for example, exploring taste, smell, touch, sound);
• The role of metaphor/imagery and the imagination in listening to the non-human/non-living;
• Ways of knowing whether or not non-human engagements have been successful.

We invite proposals for short presentations, pecha-kucha (see http://www.pechakucha.org/), installations, artworks, performances, or other formats. We also welcome participants who would like to contribute to the discussions but not make a formal presentation.

For further details, see http://www.authorityresearch.net/participations-non-human-and-non-living-others-new-york-workshop.html. Please indicate your interest in attending the workshop by filling in the online form at by March 26th 2014. The event is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and there is no fee to participate. Lunch will be provided.


Applicants will be notified within a week of the deadline for expressions of interest. For further information, please contact Tehseen Noorani ([email protected]) or Julian Brigstocke ([email protected]).

Our fourth workshop took place on the 1-2 of October at/on/in the River Torridge. We worked with artist Antony Lyons and members from the North Devon Biosphere Reserve and the Devon Wildlife Trust  to explore whether the recent Connected Communities-funded Ethical Guidelines for Community-Based Participatory Research might be extended to working with non-humans, specifically water. This is the seventh in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Julian Brigstocke.

The idea of including 'the elements' in participatory research, and even participatory democracy, might seem whimsical. After all, the essence of politics, according to one influential tradition of thought, is action; and it is also this power to act that distinguishes the human from ‘mute’ nature. According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the space of politics (as opposed to the space of the social) is one that exists outside the cyclical rhythms of nature and makes possible the start of something wholly new ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­– a break from the eternal return of identity.

The question posed to us by this workshop, then, demanded a rather different way of thinking about the politics of water. Does water have the capacity to act (to originate something new)? Can it speak? What kind of practices must we invent in order to listen to it? We know, of course, that water can be immensely powerful. The news media continually fold water into political discourses through dramatic images of the destructive power of its presence, circulation or absence: floods, droughts, storms, torrents, waves, surges, tsunamis, glaciers. Our own encounters with water on this workshop, whether walking, swimming, or sitting on a boat, invited us to reflect on other powers: the power to evade, to transport, to conduct heat, to reflect light, to nurture life, to hasten death, to enliven the senses.

Yet if water were somehow to be introduced into the sphere of democratic politics, it would not be enough merely to recognise and harness its power. Because democracy always requires structures of representation, participatory democracy requires not only a redistribution of power, but also a democratisation of authority. In other words, it needs a more egalitarian distribution of the capacity to guide, to offer advice, and to make claims that demand a response from the powerful. The challenge of participating with water, then, is an invitation to ask how water might be afforded democratic authority, rather than grasping political power. We have forgotten, perhaps, how to be guided by more-than-human life.

What kind of authority might water exercise? Classical models of politics tend to revolve around key figures of authority such as doctor, teacher and priest. Authority figures such as these offer verbal advice that cannot safely be ignored. The richly embodied nature of the activities of the workshop, however, suggested that taking advice from water will involve less representational manoeuvres. The authority of water is likely to lie, not so much in its ability to enter ‘in conversation with’ human others, or to stride forth into the demos, as in its capacity to co-operate in a democratization of the senses and a re-education of the body. Water can perhaps take on a role of healing, teaching, and spiritual guidance. Indeed, it has deployed this more-than-human authority in many different ways throughout history, not least in the major world religions such as Hindu that take guidance from water as a sacred space.

What, then, does water teach us, and how might this invigorate democratic politics? As with all democratic teaching, the lesson will offer different things to different students. Water, after all, takes an infinite variety of different forms, and it already participates in every aspect of our lives. The activities of the workshop, tracing the flows and traces of water in the biosphere, navigating the river, loping barefoot in the mud, leaping in the water, forced me to think about water’s indifference to human affairs, its vastly expanded temporal horizon. Water’s lesson, perhaps, doesn’t come from ‘listening’ to it, or from trying to ‘think as’ water through a kind of empathic communication, but from encountering it in its difference, its muteness, its remoteness from human concerns. Indeed, it is this blankness, this link to the distant past and far future, that is the mysterious source of water’s authority.

Our fourth workshop took place on the 1-2 of October at/on/in the River Torridge. We worked with artist Antony Lyons and members from the North Devon Biosphere Reserve and the Devon Wildlife Trust  to explore whether the recent Connected Communities-funded Ethical Guidelines for Community-Based Participatory Research might be extended to working with non-humans, specifically water. This is the sixth in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Antony Lyons.

It is productive - even necessary perhaps? - to have a pressing deadline, pushing me to gather my thoughts on this process of water interactions and conversations. A reflection, looking-back - to compliment the looking-ahead penned earlier this year...

Recently, I was invited to a viewing of a documentary film about artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which contains some musings on water and life, including a kind of yearning for our origins in the salt seas (Kiefer comments on the similarity between the composition of our blood and that of sea-water).

In a way, this echoes some narration text I wrote for a recently presented short film, alluding to a theory of connectedness between human brain evolution and shoreline dwelling/food supply (the Littoral Theory); the undeniable therapeutic influences of water and the sea; and of some interest to this theme, there is the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.

Below, I offer some images from a recent trip (back) to Lough Gur in Ireland - a watery place with which I've been connected since my early childhood. On this occasion I also sought out the nearby St. Munchin's 'holy well'; not a difficult quest, but one I've intended to undertake for many years, since stumbling across an old road-sign (to this well) in a reclamation yard in Bristol, my adopted home. The enduring reverence for this place - as evidenced by its upkeep and votive offerings - is a remnant strand of deep pre-Christian water enmeshment. This is still much in evidence closer to home - at Avebury/ River Kennet for example. Earlier this year, I also found such echoes in the mountains in Portugal - where I witnessed a living tradition of sacred respect for springs, pools and fonts.

But how does this relate to our 'more than human' investigations in, and around, the River Torridge in Devon? Or to participative research with water?

From the standpoint of both temporal and spatial distance, one of my most abiding memories from the workshop outings is the elusiveness of the river at its headwaters, at its 'source'; and the struggle over the boggy Culm grassland, with its sponge-like quality. To a large extent, this was in the plan, and therefore not expected to be straightforward (and water never is…). Yet the immediacy of the encounter - on the ground - was richer and more resonant than I predicted. In a limited way, we (through our squelching footsteps, like the grazing cattle) were interacting with, and adjusting, the locality’s water processes and patterns. I am left with a sense of water being all-pervasive in the pores, the microscopic rivulets of the land, and present too as deeper, warmer hydrothermal flows - again echoing water in living organisms, in humans and the veins of non-humans. (In passing, I am reminded of those moon rocks I studied as a geology student, which don't possess the myriad of tiny hydro-thermal veins that are common in earth rocks). This time of year, in North West Europe, water gets everywhere; rising damp; seeping through stone and brick walls; condensation; lingering as mist outside. The ubiquity of this material is like no other. Water is sponge-like in other ways too, with its ability to dissolve/absorb a multitude of materials (salts, metals, organic compounds), but still appear unchanged.

During our awkward, ungainly progress over the Culm bogland, we encountered two seekers from the Water Company, on a quest for an underground leak from a water main. A serendipitous meeting and most appropriate. Two water ‘dreamings’ or songlines intersecting - in time and in space. There is a need, I feel, to range laterally in our investigations of water relationships; to look once more at the variety and nuances of indigenous/older perspectives and paradigms of connectivity to the world. A re-sensitisation? And since our October field excursion, I have uncovered a book by Jacquetta Hawkes; her tour de force, A Land (1951). Here is a quote from the introduction:

What is wonderful about her writing is an embracing of a multi-faceted, multi-layered mycelial integration. A fluidity of space and - especially - time. Mutability. Complexity. Change. Extrapolating this to our current watery concerns, for me it suggests that water will not be constrained, defined, framed. Our interests, relationships and perspectives - whether sacred, philosophical or scientific - are just some small facets of the whole picture. The manifold manifestations of water are largely inaccessible, unapproachable. On the one hand, we have - as Ivan Illich pointed out - H2O (the waters of utility and industry - “a cleaning fluid” - and privately owned at that) and on the other hand there are “the waters of forgetfulness” (the mythic, symbolic, magical, unconscious). In the realms of water, we have the familiar - oftentimes romantic - 'water bodies' (rivers, lakes etc.) - relatively easy to sacralise; but water manifests as plutonic hydrothermal flows, abyssal vents, stratospheric clouds, industrial/sewage effluents - less easy for us to identify, or converse, with? (but all as real as the river…)

In the closing discussion of the 'Water Workshop', one of the emerging research ideas (or suggested thought experiments) was the prospect of speaking as…a river, a water molecule, a cloud. The meaning of this differs significantly from speaking with (in conversation) or speaking for (spokesperson). All three are imaginative, poetic leaps, (and all necessary expansions into the vitality of matter?) but speaking as involves an inhabiting of watery-ness. Perhaps this is shamanic? geopoetic? Perhaps it is not about porosity to the otherness of water(s), but a oneness with water(s)? A breaking down, or dissolution, of an insider/outsider dichotomy? (River Flows In You?)

There is mystery and unknowability with water, as with any other non-human or human entity. One approach which currently interests me involves the practical insights that can emerge from changing time-frames (speeded-up or slo-mo film or sound). Our perceptions are locked in our time-relationship to the world; we are trapped by our senses and cognition. Other living/dynamic systems reveal extraordinary, marvelous, uncanny attributes when perceived in shifted time-frames. From macro to micro, other truths, cycles, rhythms, pulses emerge; vastly more powerful and enduring than our narrow and ultimately futile efforts of control.