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Edited collection now available

"This book is a boundary-busting collection that asks an excitingly hard question—can members of a more-than-human world engage in truly participatory research? In it human experimenters sensitively recount their humble successes and insightful failures with trying to do just this. For anyone who wants to think seriously and adventurously about participation in more-than-human communities, this book is a must read."
- Katherine Gibson, Western Sydney University, Australia

"This book explores exciting new methodological horizons. After more than a decade of philosophising and theorising about human-nonhuman relations, researchers across the social sciences and humanities will find here tools to fully ‘enrol’ the non-human in their inquiries."
- Noel Castree, University of Wollongong, Australia

Buy the book (or order for your library)

CFP: Co-production of knowledge with non-humans

20/12/2013

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Members of the MPR project are contributing to convening sessions at next year's Royal Geographical Society conference in London 26-29 August on the topic of more-than-human participatory research. Details of how to submit a proposal can be found at the bottom of this post.

Co-production of knowledge with non-humans:  plants, animals,  materialities - spaces and places
Convenors: Michelle Bastian (Edinburgh), Michael Buser (UWE), Owain Jones (Gloucester), Emma Roe (Southampton) 

Sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group and the Participatory Geographies Research Group

Session abstract
This session will explore how the co-production of knowledge within (and between) communities is being expanded beyond narrowly human  notions of community to take into account the ‘voices’, needs and agencies of non-humans. We seek to explore how co-production has been done (historical examples), is being done, and can be done (imagined futures), with panoplies of non-humans which range through animals, plants, technologies and materials within space-time in both topological and topographical formations.  We feel that expanding the processes of knowledge creation through co-production is a necessary step in efforts to address the toxic nature/culture divide and in developing materialist techno-ecologicalisation of politics and ethics (Haraway, Latour, Bennett, Barad etc.). We need deeper engagements with the ecological (taken in its broadest sense), materialised processes which conjure communities into being, sustain them,  set them together, apart, in conflict, and bring them down; and in how they might be reformed into more just configurations.  We seek contributions which: report upon work that has sought to co-produce knowledge with non-humans;  speculate (plan) conceptually and methodologically on  how co-productions with non-humans of differing stripe might be done; stage dialogues between specialists in co-production and those specialising in the more-than-human (broadly conceived).
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The co-production of research with(in) communities is a welcome effort to democratize, de-centre and reenergize knowledge production (Durose et al).  Inspired by a variety of feminist epistemologies, as well as emancipatory movements from South America and Africa (e.g. Freire), the central components of the co-production agenda have been the desire to support the inclusion of marginalised voices in the research process, to make research accountable to those it affects, and, in the process, to transform the practices of research and knowledge production. However co-production often remains in the human/social realm consisting of partnerships, collaborations, conflict management, development plans, etc. between individual and collective social agencies. We are concerned that co-produced research which stays within the (narrowly prescribed) social (human) realm becomes ‘part of the problem’ rather than ‘part of the solution’ in terms of  long term flourishing of diverse life.

One of the foremost proponents of participatory research - Peter Reason – has argued that the ethical and political imperatives implicit within the co-production paradigm need to be extended to non-humans. Claiming that we need to re-conceive ourselves as embedded within biotic systems, Reason characterises the notion of the more-than-human as an emergent edge within participatory research. Durose et al have also drawn attention to how long-standing epistemological debates about the nature of knowledge and expertise lie at the heart of debate about the impact of co-producing research.

Engagement with a whole range of work that identifies human exceptionalism as a fundamental impediment to knowledge, has been recognized as key to effectively addressing socio-ecological challenges. The (neglected)  interdependencies between the social and the ecological are writ large in the current era of ‘ecocide’, and realigning them from toxic to therapeutic forms is essential. However, transformative dialogues between co-production practitioners and those working on the more-than-human, which promise so much for both approaches, have yet to take place.

Thus we are specifically interested to explore how co-produced research can be inclusive of a wider set of actors than just the human. And in how to meet the challenges and opportunities offered by exploring methods and philosophies of co-production and how it might be transformed by the recognition of experiences, desires and knowledges of more-than-human agencies. And, in turn, how more-than-human approaches might learn from the attentiveness to community, voice, participation and methodology which have been developed within the field of co-production.  The session draws inspiration from a variety of recent projects and writings which have sought to bring non-humans of one kind or another (plants, animals, technologies, and wider materialised processes) into knowledge co-production. These have variously engaged with ideas of empathy, agency, witnessing, experimental partnering, data sonification, narrative theory, conversation and voice to explore possibilities of co-working with non-humans.

Contributions (using tradition or non-tradition formats) might:
  • report upon work that has sought to co-produce knowledge with non-humans.
  • speculate (plan) conceptually and methodologically on how co-productions with non-humans of differing stripe might be done.
  • stage dialogues between specialists in co-production and those specialising in the more-than-human (broadly conceived).
  • explore methods for more-than-human participatory research.
  • explore what areas like animal-geographies could learn from participatory geographies
  • outline the possibilities of working with non-humans as agents, including the place of scientific, craft and art expertise, learning from ethology and from those who work with and know particular non-humans.
  • propose ways of de-centring the human, moving from Cartesian knowing self to a more ecological form of self as collective/network.
  • shed light on the interplay between theriomorphism and anthropomorphism and explore the interface between becoming-human and becoming-animal.
We hope to run 2 sessions of 4 or 5 papers (or equivalent effort)

Please send questions and email proposals (title, 200 word abstract) by the 31st of January 2014 to one or more of:
  • Michelle Bastian
  • Michael Buser
  • Owain Jones

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Co-design with water: epiphanies, empathies

19/12/2013

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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 fifth in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Reiko Goto Collins.
At the end of the workshop Michelle asked us how a new language might emerge from this workshop. I have been thinking about this question in relation to “empathy” that is my research interest and practice. Empathy is an act of perceiving in which we reach out to the other to grasp his/her state or condition. It consists of one’s emotional and physical experiences.

The workshop was an experience-based enquiry. I did not know much about the workshop area, its landscape or catchments. I knew only a few of the people from previous conferences..

The workshop really began over dinner, with information shared by experts. Then the next day we would have an expert tour of the Culm a unique ecosystem, at the top of the catchment basin. We then had a boat ride in the estuary guided by a fisherman. We felt the landscape changes from the mouth of the river (with its old industrial structures, and new summer homes) to the wooded upper river that came alive with wildlife. Meanwhile Antony was checking the conductivity in the saline water, everyone was taking pictures and talking together. The last day of the workshop we were asked to go into the Torridge River. In early October it was a cloudy day. I did not bring my swimming suit. Niamh was impressive, she jumped in the Torridge River first, then others followed little by little. François said something touched her foot in the water. Was it fish? This encouraged me to follow them. The middle of the river was deeper but people could stand on the smooth riverbed. The water was cold. I put my face down to float. I felt little fear until suddenly I felt a sharp pain on my shoulder. (I am being treated for a bad shoulder.) But when my body started floating, I became relaxed. I could see under water. It was greenish brown. The colour of the water reminded me of similar experiences in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.  Tim and I worked on a research project called 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (3R2N) between 2000 and 2005. It was one of the summers we were on the project boat. Tim and I had dived in the Allegheny River. The water was warm but refreshing, it felt endlessly deep and big, it felt wide and very long. I could not see much, just greenish brown colour. We had spent years learning everything we could about the ecological recovery of nature and culture. I still hear the voice of that place, its experts and communities. And in my mind I still see myself going through the landscape, with millions of Mayfly in the air, and schools of fish cfollowing and playing with our boat.

Empathetic experience moves towards something foreign rather than something familiar. In this workshop the greenish brown coloured water was something familiar and the coldness of the Torridge River was the foreign experience for me. I was surprised when I did not become panic in the water when I could not rely on my arm because of the shoulder pain. I sat on the anchor of the bridge to watch other people. It was another foreign experience to be in the water together. I thought about the last two days talking, eating and doing things together with a respectful manner, but we did not know each other much. We kept smiling at each other. After we dressed again, we became a little more playful. We dropped twigs from the bridge to see which one could go through the bridge first. Owain’s fern won.
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Touching the water in the Torridge River was important. In this case asking the water by touching it. It was a trigger for an “empathised experience” that would come from real life or form within ourselves, our inner perception.

Any one can touch the water of the river. It is quite possible a person does not have any memorable experience of a river. Then, the experience becomes foundational; but this is not likely. Everything we do is a learning opportunity that may expand experience it may not prove to be meaningful until some time in the future. How about people who have had a water epiphany already? Touching water is a beginning of the discourse to listen to others including people, things and the environment in deeper level. After the workshop some people submitted their reflection writing. Different individuals experience and expertise result in diverse stories. Each of us is connected to different parts of the world. Each of us shuffles the words and re-constructs the story for the new audience. In this repeated process a little schism occurs. Empathy tries to fill the gap between familiar and foreign, known and unknown within new experience, and perhaps with other people’s voice. If we meditate well in this process we may understand others a little further. New language can emerge when we understand the other and find the reason why it as important us, as other people are.

Reiko Goto Collins, 30 November 2013
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Co-design with water: power, flows, knowing

16/12/2013

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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 fourth in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Françoise Wemelsfelder.
For this project we spent a lovely day experiencing and engaging with water, and here are some of my reflections. Water always brings flow, life force, fluidity, transportation, open-ness. Most people enjoy being near water, it has a presence that differs from being on land, it is moving ground. But it is also dangerous, nothing to hold on to, and when that force gets going, it is terrifying. Last night I happened on some youtube clips showing huge storm seas and waves and swells in which boats were tossed around like little toys. I was mesmerised, awed, by the power visible. I experienced that power too close for comfort, capsizing in a yacht at sea steered by an incompetent skipper, tossed into the waves. And so at our water workshop, my body, climbing into a small motor boat to negotiate a placid river on a calm day, remembered and shuddered.
I almost did not come along, but the skipper put me at ease – I felt I trusted him and decided to risk it. We chug along, mostly sitting still, letting our eyes and thoughts wander over the water, a pleasant sort of dreamy introspection. For a while the river’s presence is a bit undefined, surrounded by human contraptions, fairly straightened, useful. But then suddenly she breaks loose and begins to sway, meandering along woodland, birds flying and calling overhead. We perk up. Very graceful, slender, the river moves, not at all threatening. However, yesterday, watching those massive waves on my PC, I realised that that power is always there, and I will always be wary on water, however calm.

But that is not a bad thing – it means I will be alive to water’s agency. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold says, there are no ‘things’ in nature, only movement - no waves, only waving, no stream, only streaming, and living properly in nature is to move with it. We don’t live on the earth, but in it. It is not so obvious what that means, how we can learn to be present with water, with trees, with animals…in mutual sentience. Yet many indigenous peoples do know, and our skipper did too.

I have become interested in how poetry and science might meet, because good poetry so often has that flow, that moving ‘with’. I remember how years ago I was driving home late in a clear frosty night, and heard a poem on the radio about the moon, and again I was mesmerised, it was so sharp, so evocative, the moon was so there. Science could not improve on that immediacy of understanding – yet poetry is so personal, what works for me might not for you, how can it ever have communal value…? But it is a conversation, a personal expression, and surely could unlock doors for us. I have very much enjoyed reading other people’s blogs on this website, they are all poetic, personal conversations, transporting me to different places and experiences, connecting me and making me feel at home. How to bring such flow into our knowing….?
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Boat movement by Marietta Galazka
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Co-design with water: Boundless

10/12/2013

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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 third in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Clara Mancini.
Reflecting on the experience of this workshop makes me think of Leonardo da Vinci. To me he represents the perfect synthesis between the artist and the scientist, who like no other could at the same time creatively intuit and rigorously study what Donna Haraway would call nature’s material semiotics. Leonardo’s boundless intellect and empathy allowed him to grasp things about nature that the world would take hundreds of years to catch up on. What I have learnt about Leonardo’s attitude towards nature seems relevant here: perhaps the reason we struggle with the idea that water (or trees, or bees or dogs) have agency and can participate in research is because our thinking is bound by all we have learnt about what agency and participation are supposed to be, and by the divisions and limitations that non-empathetic eyes have imposed on beings whose semiotics are material rather than abstract.    

Leonardo had a thing for water, the “vehicle of nature” as life-giver and taker, and its natural cycle’s metamorphoses and constant shaping work (often represented in his paintings as rivers running across the wilderness of rocky landscapes). Indeed this workshop has made me reflect on the essence of water not as an abstract, chemical entity, but as a “vehicle of nature”. I felt this quite clearly during our boat trip on the Torridge, particularly once we left behind Appledore’s port, with its engineered banks and crowding boats, and we started encountering immense trees and rolling fields, and many species of bird going about their daily life along the sinuously narrowing river.
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In that place it was easier for me to think of water as ‘someone’, perhaps because animals and plants have no means to override water’s agency and have to negotiate with it instead: the trees’ leaves did not grow below the tidal level, birds were floating with the current, and the banks were undulated as the river had designed them. In contrast, back in the port, the tidal bell that didn’t work seemed to me rather emblematic of humans’ tendency to override and thus fail to grasp the workings of nature. I wonder, would the fishes and birds who live with the river make the same mistakes we make in our ‘management practices’? Have our abstract semiotics, which allow us to learn from books and be bound by what we find in them, made us unable to encounter reality with innocent eyes and empathy? Leonardo thought that Experience was the mother of all Knowledge and indeed perhaps certain material semiotics simply escape abstraction and are only accessible if experienced with the boundless intellect and empathy Leonardo had. Perhaps we cannot explain away water as a participating agent, but perhaps we can know it as such by experience when we witness and engage with a system of relationships (such as that which exists between a river, its birds, trees and banks), which water sustains and shapes.

One of my favourite quotes from Leonardo is:
Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses, especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else
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Just as water is part of everything that lives and everything that lives is made of water, this workshop has made me feel more than all the other workshops how human and more-than-human are essentially and fundamentally connected, and has made me wish that our academic modes of enquiry and knowledge, and their semiotics, were just as boundless.
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Co-design with water: gravity, empathy, interaction

10/12/2013

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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 second in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Owain Jones.
“All water wants, all water ever wants, is to fall”

From “Lifted” By Jo Bell (Unpublished poem – read on BBC Radio 4 Poetry Please, 19 10 2013)
I did say – on a few occasions, we had not discussed gravity enough. We did seek out the high places to start with, where the waters on the upper slopes creep through the culm wetlands, amass into tiny rivulets and then into a discernible stream. (If we could find it – which we did – in the end). And there right at the top of the catchment, wriggling  life was stuck to the brown rocks Tim pulled from the water with surface tension. But yes,  the top of the catchment. With a journey to make, down through the stream, then river, then mingling  with the tidal ebb and flow, a ‘river beneath the river’ as Philip Gross has it. Testing for salinity or freshness to find the river in the water.
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But who is to say where the catchment really starts? Does the gravity that pulls the rain down form part of the catchment? What about the clouds carrying the water vapour , what about the prevailing winds that might carry falling rain across country  into the catchment’s ‘air space’. Humans are so good at naming things, at making the world into objects. Rivers. Rain. Stream. I don’t think the water really heeds such distinctions.

But now, in a discernible stream, a run of water of such age and power that it has carved out its route into the land. Not straight down of course, but meandering, finding the path of least resistant through soil, tree roots, strata of rocks. And it carries. And it is home to some. Water we are told – is inert, this is why it is such a good basis of life. The matrix of cell activity > life. In it things can meet. Water is the ultimate networker, the relational god.  And the fresh water mussels – we are told – live in the flow of water for maybe a hundred years, putting on their shells like tree rings. But they have not bred for fifty years. The connections and the carryings are troubled.  

The loose materiality of water is animated by gravity - it is workable, by a fin, or webbed foot, or oar of diesel driven propeller. But it hangs together enough to have weight. To press back on the hull of the boat, on our bodies as we swim. 

Jan Salby – in his critique of empathy asks:
“How might one possibly do this: imagining being the other - without inevitably projecting and thus imposing what is in fact our own ‘being’ onto the other person? Can we really successfully, genuinely imagine being an other person?”
(Or for us - being an other non-human)

Please excuse this longish quote,  but here is the start of his answer. It not the whole answer of course, but I feel in some respects we began to enact this kind of procedure when in the boat, testing the water, swimming etc:
"Recent phenomenological work on what has become known as interaction theory has the potential to make some progress in this regard, putting forth a possible alternative to empathetic perspective -shifting. It is no accident that interaction theory thoroughly breaks with simulation accounts of empathy. This approach, as developed by authors such as Shaun Gallagher, Joel Krueger, Thomas Fuchs, Matthew Ratcliffe and others, does not conceive of the understanding of another’s mind as a case of one person simulating or mirroring an other’s mentality, but instead focuses on mutual interactive engagement and on an emphatic co-presence or ‘being-with’ one another. Instead of the inquisitive attempt of one ‘mind’ getting ‘at’ or even ‘into’ another, a kind of joint agency, and joint active world-orientation is established. With this, interaction theorists appreciate what has just been shown: that the only way to meaningfully engage with another person’s mentality without imposition is by engaging with them on the level of agency — establishing co-engagement, as it were, for example by jointly enacting a project. “Participatory sense-making” has been one helpful concept developed for this purpose (de Jaegher & di Paolo 2007), another is the concept of a “we-space” (Krueger 2011) —a realm of co-presence, bodily enacted between interacting individuals. In these various forms of joint active engagement, the interactants might come to achieve a kind of coalescence that brings forth exactly the kind of ‘union of minds’ that advocates of empathy strive for — not by way of simulation but rather by first building up a joint perspective on the world that both may then adopt as their own. Thus, there is an active, constructive and forward-looking element here that establishes connection between individuals—instead of a miraculous bridge between two essentially closed-off inner realms.”

Emphasis added - Slaby, J. (in preparation). Against Empathy: Critical Theory and the Social Brain. Draft Manuscript, comments welcome [pdf]. Online at http://www.janslaby.com/
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Co-design with water: an aesthetic conceptual provocation

9/12/2013

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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 first in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Tim Collins.
In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water....has become the victim of indifference.

Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring
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Going into this I thought about what I know. I am a water being, nurtured in the amniotic sea then born to the Pawtuxet River Watershed. I know water as an image that can be re-presented through a range of art media. I know water as an idea and a poetic reverie through thinkers like Bachelard. I know water as a requirement of life, delivered, purified and putrefied as it passes from watershed through potable systems and back out again to the world as sewage and waste water. I know water as the substance that dissolves all things, that picks up traces of everything it comes into contact with. I know water in terms of its relationship to the air, and the airs relationship to it; I have seen its breath in the fall.  I know water in terms of its process of erosion and deposition. I know water as a physical chemistry, as a nutrient laden fluid that dissipates its own life giving oxygen content, as a bearer of pathogens and toxicants. I know water in its freshwater forms and saltwater forms, its densities shaped by both minerals and temperature. I know water as Mother Ocean; her tides and waves, the source of fog, wind and life on earth. I spent years chasing swells and tides, reefs and sand bars, peaks and troughs. I know water as the home of creatures that have played along side of me, otters, dolphins and seals that take the same pleasures in engaging that environment with others. I know water as the miraculous expanded gas that collapses into liquid then a solid that miraculously floats. This latter fact is an odd essential material condition of life on earth; otherwise the ice sinks and overwhelms the warmth of the sun.  Three days, maybe five without water and I am dead, this is all that I know about water as a human on planet earth.
"Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips"

Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), "The Madwoman of Chaillot"
As an artist I know that a drop of water in an overhead pool produces shadows that levitate from a spot on the floor that rises up the walls in concentric circles. I know chemicals that burst into flame with a drop of water. I know that if I place ten quail’s eggs into an aquarium filled with salt water and fresh, at least six of them will settle in the middle of the tank, suspended on the salt water. I know how much water it takes to counterbalance myself ten feet out a third story window, raising questions about water within and water outside the body, questions of balance and flow, public and private, nature and culture. I know that the water system of the City of San Francisco was purchased from private industry for the same price paid for the entire state of Alaska. I know that Kana Wai, is the law of water, the Hawaiian alternative to the law of the land. Curiously it demands equitable co-responsibility and sharing of the resource versus private ownership and property rights. I recognize water as material, as phenomenon and as ecological system in the work of the grandfathers and grandmothers in my field of research, practice and creative inquiry. I recognize water it recognizes me, maybe this is why dowsing works.
The fairies who have just surprised a boor who has polluted their spring are in secret conference: "What do you wish for the one who muddied our water, my sisters?" "That he become a stammerer and never be able to articulate a word." "And you my sister?"  "That he always go about with his mouth open and stand gaping in the street." "And you my sister?" "That he never take a step without, all due respect to you....breaking wind.

A legend from Lower Normandy recorded by Paul Sebillot in "Le Folklore de France"
As a Workshop Participant
As we say in Scotland, there were times I was lost in the blather. Wondering why we were sitting on our asses when there were springs to be hunted, to be chased on muddies knees, to listen to the spot where water emerges from the soil… but I learned that was not what we were about. At least not logically. Clara on the way would say… "‘Look’ the landscape has changed what is that?" It was the colm (culm) we were searching for. But we were prepared for a landscape survey, a visual relationship rather than the mud and boots, body, mind and soul, the sound and the mud variation of spring hunting that I prefer.
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At least not to start, but… the boat trip changed that, a long reveries, a Conradian adventure, where we were not so much lost, but dazed and confused in the depths of the land, steered by a waterman who I think drank to our madness that night. Starting from where the social/cultural infrastructure had collapsed at the mouth of the river, from when we began, to the trip toward the headwaters where the hand of man faded, then the riparian forest dipped in. The saline flood of the tide, manicuring that forest to create an exquisite line, above the air began to fill with the birds and we all – sensed this IS the right place. The salt water / sweet water experiments entertained me to no end, its important when mucking about in boats to have a reason to put your hand in the water! 
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But the kicker was the immersion; Reiko and I didn’t believe that British researchers would do it. When we realized it was so we were down to our underwear (one does not skinny dip in Britain, despite the sensibility of it). In we went, a ponderous swim for me who is usually the water person. I was worried (Reiko has a bad shoulder and struggled to clear the bridge abutment) and as a result distracted and cold, but nonetheless managed a stream-addled version of ‘Breath’ by Birago Diop under the bridge.
Listen more to things                           Than to words that are said   

The waters voice sings                        And the flame cries     

And the wind that brings                     The woods to sighs

                        Is the breathing of the dead                

                                                                                    —Birago Diop--
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That dip in the water reminded me that it is only in immersion that we can hope to have any clarity about a relationship with a non-verbal thing. The river speaks to all of us. It shaped our emotions and perceptions, it threatened us and embraced us. We swam despite passer-bys warning us not to… but more importantly as we stood in the stream we realized that beneath the surface was an incredible life force as living things rolled across our feet. Picking up a rock, I found the caddis fly chamber I had been looking for, Reiko said ‘them’, they –are- here… ; )
Eutopia versus Utopia: Issues of the Regional Imperative:

When Patrick Geddes coined the word Eutopia, meaning "good place," in his address to the Sociological Society in July 1904, he proved too much for some of the intellectuals of London. In comparing it with the commonly understood Utopia coined by Thomas More, a word derived from the Greek "no place," he summed up a fundamental tenet of the regional imperative: that it makes sense to design with the forms and cultural and ecological processes already present in a location rather than to force an idealized, preconceived plan upon a site. Eutopia is assured when culture and ecology become part of the design thinking. Utopia is the consequence of ignoring them.

Michael Hough "Out of Place; Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape"
Why work together, with water?
I don’t think that we can simply work together with water; it works through us, it is us. 'Why listen to it?' and 'What can it tell us?' might be better questions.  When we link human to communities of ecology and the complex material/life interactions in place we have to remember to think differently and reshape our ethical parameters. To listen to water takes all the skills and ability, tools and technology, chemistry and attention that we can muster; in which case, simply put, it tells us everything about the world around us.  The fundamental question is how is an artist or humanities scholar’s method differentiated from that of a scientist? Traditionally it's through looking, but a gaze is not enough anymore, it requires sustained being-with, it is about intimate inter-relationship over time so that we begin to see a normative aesthetic, a condition of baseline health which allows us to see the signs that tells us that something has changed. To do this work well (which we have in common with science) we must love the subject of our inquiry. Differentiating the arts and humanities, it is what we want to know, what we need to experience, the purpose of aesthetic empiricism if you will. We are not looking for definitive reproducible answers; we are looking for core experiential truths that dip below the surface, that engage the heart, the mind, and the soul at the same time. But at the end of the day, we have to work with water on its own terms.

Thoughts on the Community-based Participatory Research Guide.
[In our last session of the workshop we worked through core questions from the  Guide to Ethical Practice in Community-based Participatory Research to explore how they might apply to research with water - Ed.]
"Water is the principle, or the element of all things"

Thales of Miletus
Who should be involved?
Anyone who has spent the time to develop an empathic relationship with living water in that place should be engaged. Empathy only emerges in place over time, it is recognition of the normative health of a living thing that leads to attention to those things that indicate disruption. The question is can we see pleasure and joy in living things that have neither language nor eyes with which to speak to our ears or our heart.
"In the dialectical theme of the purity and impurity of water, the fundamental law of material imagination acts in both directions, guaranteeing the eminently active nature of the substance: one drop of pure water suffices to purify an ocean; one drop of impure water suffices to defile a universe."

Gaston Bachelard "Water and Dreams; An essay on the Imagination of Matter"
What are the Aims and Objectives of the Research?
Funny questions: Surely we all realize that the objective is to trust ourselves as we strive to hear things from something that does not speak, to find emotional communion with a living thing that has no eyes. Our goal is to find our health and wellbeing in it, and it in us; to recognize the ethical principles that underpin this endeavour.
…Water is the only substance on earth that naturally occurs in all three states at temperatures we normally experience: solid, liquid and gas.  "No scientist ancient or modern has ever managed a quantitative description of the thermodynamics of water, it is to the structural analyst what Waterloo was to Bonaparte. Tens of thousands of years ago our wise forbearers shared myths wherein water was said to be the primal, chaotic substance from which all forms proceed. It is clear that our forbearers have not been refuted, clarified or improved upon. "

Titus Irving Gerrad speaking about the structure of water in the monograph; "What is Water?"
How to analyse and interpret data?
Honestly, with humility and attention to the role that the arts and humanities play in the conception, perception and experience that leads to a critical understanding and potential evolution of human values through a reflective relationship with water. Water speaks to us through its component parts, its dissolution and erosion, its non-structural integrity, by its ability to flow around and about, through all things, to embody the lightest breeze, the smallest drop and the wildest gale, taking the form of the force which engages...

Fini: Tim (with Reiko in mind, although she has her own notes.)
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Co-design with Trees: Plant Intelligence

9/12/2013

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Our third workshop took place on the 11th -12th of September at The Forest of Dean. We worked with the Wye Valley AONB and Wildwood Coppice Crafts to think through how a performative and experiential research approach might be extended to working with trees. This is the sixth in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Michelle Bastian.
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For each workshop we have been setting ourselves a series of  readings, some focused on the participatory method we will be working with, and others on the particular research partner. To date, one of the papers that has really transformed my view of the world was Anthony Trewavas' paper Green Plants as Intelligent Organisms. His short, fascinating argument proposes that if intelligent behaviour is understood in terms of a capacity for problem solving, then showing that plants do indeed solve problems must lead us to conclude that plants should be classified as intelligent organisms.

Addressing the obvious problem that plants don't have any kind of centralized control tissue or brain-like equivalent, Trewavas utilises an analogy with social insects which have come to be understood more widely as intelligent at the level of the hive (e.g. hive mind). In much the same way he argues that for plants "intelligent behaviour arises as a property of the whole integrated cell and tissue system" (414).  Outlining the variety of methods plants use to sense the environment and to communicate between their different parts, he argues that plants' use of complex signals enable them to behave as an integrated organism.

These integrated systems allow plants to solve a wide variety of problems in context-specific ways. These include adjusting to fluctuations in resources (whether seasonally e.g. rain, or spatially e.g. variations in soil type), being eaten or disturbed, encountering obstacles (e.g. boulders, or cliffs), competition from other plants, finding unexploited resources, and how to optimally place roots, shoots and leaves so that they can take advantage of the resources that are available (414). Importantly, plants don't make decisions about these issues in the moment, but make predictions about future conditions in order to attain optimal fitness (415). For example Trewavas uses the example of the Mayapple which "makes commitment decisions as to branching or flowering years ahead" (415). He also notes that plants are able to predict future shade patterns (via reflected far-red/red light) and change their shape in response before light is actually lost (415).

But are these organisms intelligent or merely 'pre-programmed'? Couldn't it be the case that plants are only following simple inbuilt rules rather than engaging in problem solving behaviour? Trewavas' answer to this is that the range of environmental factors that a plant responds to is so high that the flexibility required is too great for the organism to be pre-programmed. Adding together potential abiotic factors (e.g. soil acidity, light, radiation, temperature, water, atmospheric gases, and soil) and  biotic factors (e.g. predation, disease, trampling and disturbance), together with the ability to recognise different strengths of these factors leads Trewavas to claim that "the number of possible environments in which a temperate plant might grow is to the order of 10^8" (416). This number is so high that "only intelligent, flexible responses can provide the individual with the ability to master this complexity of environment and maximize sibling number" (416). 

With all this in mind, I spent the day prior to our workshop walking through the Forest of Dean looking for evidence of intelligence - here's what I found:
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Writing about trees: Owain Jones in conversation with Frances Presley

6/12/2013

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In 2002 Owain Jones  (with Paul Cloke)  published the book Tree Cultures and since then has kept up a series of conversations with academics,  artists and professionals about ‘aboriculture’. Recently, Owain has been in conversation with the poet Frances Presley who became aware of his work on trees through the book. Frances writes poetry and prose on landscape, language, nature and history. Her current Arts Council funded project involves engaging with individual trees in particular landscape settings. In late October, Owain and Frances spent a day visiting trees sites in Bristol and also met with the botanist Libby Houston who is an expert on the rare whitebeam trees that grow in Avon Gorge Bristol. Below is an extract of their conversation and some pictures of the day…
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Smokelight by Frances Presley (c)
24 October 2013, Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol.

FP: I am very conscious of the difference between urban space and somewhere like Exmoor, especially the context and extent of it.  As an artist you could take a close up of a leaf or a tree and it could be anywhere, but it isn’t.  As a writer in London I am conscious all the time of the thinness of it…

OJ: Thinness?

FP:  The thinness of the experience in terms of the tree and where it is situated – the fragility of nature before you get back into the urban.  It is a completely different experience to having that almost infinite reach you get in wild landscapes.  I think trees behave in different ways in the city – as well as people.

OJ:  How definable is that?

FP:  I think it happens in the work.  Using language you draw in more aspects of the landscape and the people who live there, the whole area.

OJ: Some aspects of that must be unconscious.

FP:  Yes, there is a richness and density of experience on the moor which makes itself felt in the writing.

OJ:  Which is the opposite to thinness I suppose.

FP:  But the thinness is also interesting, almost more interesting at times.  There are violent juxtapositions, such as the trees and the graffiti on the Parkland Walk in London – a disused railway line.  Trees are stressed in the city, even sometimes graffitied, as if they were another brick wall.
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Image courtesy of Owain Jones (c)
PictureImage courtesy of Owain Jones (c)
OJ:  Can you say – when you encounter a tree somewhere like Exmoor – how that feeds into the work?  Is it hard to say?

FP:  Right now it is!

OJ: Is it a process you don’t articulate?

FP: Well – it is in the writing – in the text.  Saying that is a way for me to avoid discussing it in another kind of discourse, such as this one.  That’s part laziness and partly a sense that an explanation could be become turgid and superfluous.  The poem itself is a manifesto.

OJ: Is the text reworked or does it stay as it emerged?

FP:  Both, but usually it is reworked.  Sometimes it just does not work at all – the text has another kind of thinness – it is too slight.  The notes towards a poem have to have a movement and substance of their own.  Something has to be emerging, rather like the tree.  Perhaps even travelling, like a migrating birch.

There is one poem I’ve had a lot of difficulty with, but I’ve still kept it, can’t quite get rid of it, even though it hasn’t quite worked.  It has to do with an isolated oak tree known as Hoar Oak on Exmoor, up on the top, near the Chains, beyond Simonsbath, right up on the top.  And it is this fragile thing.  It barely survives.  But it is ‘significant’ and it has a fence around it.  It’s a struggle to get there.  You have to wade across a river and miles of bog.  This poor thing is barely on the verge of existence.  It reminded me of the crazy people I heard about, the Breatharians, who try to live on air (obviously a sect that has not survived long).  It is like that, this tree just trying to live on the atmosphere.  It has virtually nothing else in terms of nutrients.  And the poem is a very slim, slight poem that has got thinner and slighter, but I am reluctant to let go because it represents something.  It represents the least you can have to grow as an oak.  It is as fragile as it could be.  Like the urban trees it is growing under stress and in the wrong place.

OJ:  Have you a sense of how old it is?

FP:  It’s not that old, because the original Hoar Oak was destroyed.  It was replaced in the 1900s because it is a significant site, an ancient oak that has to be replaced, but the conditions are no longer tenable.  It’s still there, but only just.

OJ: Like the poem

FP:  Yes!

Later FP read a passage from Roger Miles The Trees and Woods of Exmoor (Exmoor Press, 1972) to OJ  on the Hoar Oak:
‘Of all the boundary marks of the old deer forest of Exmoor, the most famous is a tree… The original tree – or the first of which we have record – fell ‘with very age and rotteness’ in 1658.  A second was planted in 1662.  That fell down on Boxing Day, 1916.  Then several saplings were planted on the eastern side of the combe.  One remains, struggling bravely within iron railings against a hostile climate.  Although over 50 years old, the trunk diameter is scarcely more than a hand’s span.’
For work by Frances Presley see:
  • Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976 - 2005  Exeter: Shearsman, 2006
  • www.shearsman.com
  • Lines of sight  Exeter: Shearsman, 2009 
  • Stone settings, with Tilla Brading, Minehead: Odyssey Books, 2010
  • An Alphabet for Alina, with Peterjon Skelt, Hereford: Five Seasons, 2012  www.fiveseasonspress.com 
  • The Ground Aslant: an anthology of radical landscape poetry, edited by Harriet Tarlo, Exeter: Shearsman, 2011
  • “Common pink metaphor: from ‘The Landscape Room’ to Somerset Letters”, in How2, 2008
  • Collaborative sequence with American poet Julia Cohen: www.likestarlings.com. 
  • British Electronic Poetry: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/;
  • Archive of the Now: www.archiveofthenow.org.uk;
  • Poetry International:  http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net.
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Water, Water-Bodies, Water-Ways

2/12/2013

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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 post originally appeared on Antony Lyons' blog and explores the planning process for the workshop. 
"You can't keep water down"
This comment bubbled up in discussion with Dr. Owain Jones at his PLaCE seminar talk last month (the final instalment of the long-running PLaCE Research speaker sessions).  Over the coming weeks and months, I'm aiming to write a detailed blog-post on what could be termed the 'geopoetics' of each of the materials woven in to my intermedia installation for the recent Tramontana Festival 2013. Water is the topic of the first of these.

Water, and water matters, pervade and infuse most of my landscape-based projects, and this 'element' looms large throughout my background of transdisciplinary activity, bridging across science, design and art. In the late 1980s I was to be found carrying out greenhouse experiments with duckweed (Lemna spp.), testing the potential to bio-cleanse industrial effluents. As the wheels of time tend to bring one back again, I have once more found myself in a close encounter with this unpretentious plant - in the context of a symbolic material incorporated in an intermedia art installation (more on this in a future post). For many years I have been involved in research, development and promotion of what were - in the '80s - the relatively novel eco/water/design-technologies of 'reed bed sewage treatment' and 'sustainable drainage systems' (SuDS). These involvements continue today, but are increasingly located in creative/visioning modes, rather than in the applied technical realms. Water often surfaces in unexpected ways.

One new and unpredictable scenario for me is an involvement with a research project that sets out to explore (in the context of 'more-than-human participatory research') some aspects of being 'in conversation with water' and 'designing with water'. For this project, my role is to be a lynchpin of sorts, and to lead a field-trip to the River Torridge, in Devon - site of my 2012 collaborative residency project, Shadows and Undercurrents. This novel confluence of topic and site has led me to reflect on my own long-term and deep participation with water, water-bodies and water-ways (their ecological health, their dynamics, their secrets...).

You can read the rest of Antony's post here.
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"Conversation with trees after fire"

20/11/2013

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Part of the City of Trees project by UK artist Jyll Bradley reflecting upon "Canberra’s 100 years through an exploration of the city’s remarkable tree-scapes". This includes 7 audio pieces, (linked to a map of the city)  By Jyll Bradley with Jonquil Panting (BBC Radio Producer). Music by Michael Sollis, performed by The Griffyn Ensemble

http://www.canberra100.com.au/programs/city-of-trees/
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