Our second workshop took place on the 31st May - 1st of June at Pershore College. We worked with the Evesham Beekeepers Association and Vale Heritage Landscape Trust to think through how the participatory action research approach might be extended to working with non-humans. This is the fourth in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Clara Mancini.
I came to the ‘In conversations with bees’ workshop with both expectancy and dread. I was very much looking forward to meeting the bees, but I was also afraid. While I was putting on the white suite, I was feeling rather apprehensive: I did not know whether the bees would accept my presence, I did not know how to look at them in the eyes or how to predict their reactions. In other words, I had no clue how to listen or talk to bees. I just hoped that I could rely on my alien-like suite to fend off possible attacks. Once at the hive, I was conscious that - as advised by our guides - I needed to move calmly and take care not to interfere with the bees’ activities. This focussed my attention on them and their actions, at which point I started forgetting my fearful feelings, and I started marvelling at their beauty and amazing works instead. This makes me think that overcoming the barriers that prevent us from sharing the same space with and becoming aware of the ‘other’ has to be the first step towards participatory research. With dogs we could take this space-sharing and mutual awareness more or less for granted, but certainly not with bees (not for me anyway). Unlike with dogs - who can return our gaze and whose gaze we can return, who have lived among us for millennia and whom we have trained to respond in ways we deem appropriate (or else!) - for most of us simply sharing the same space with bees is an ability that has to be developed.
It seems that many people are aware of how important bees are for humans and how dramatically they are declining; but while most are keen for someone to help bees recover, they don’t want to be around bees (including my neighbours!). However, at the workshop I learnt that cities, so typically human spaces, have now become more hospitable for bees than the open countryside, because they provide a variety of vegetation from gardens which bees need but which the country has lots due to extensive farming. So, ironically, it seem that finding ways of bringing people to share the same spaces with and acquiring proper awareness of bees has become almost a necessity for the sake of humanity as well as the bees themselves. This seems to me an opportunity for participatory research to widen the focus from co-designing with bees individual hives (as we saw that some researchers have done) to co-designing with humans and bees new ways of constructing space-sharing and mutual awareness abilities and practices at a systemic level, to create new hybrid urban models. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology is rapidly transforming the model of the city into that of the ‘smart city’…perhaps in this transition, intertwined with the smart city of humans, we will also see the emergence of the ‘smart city of bees’.
It seems that many people are aware of how important bees are for humans and how dramatically they are declining; but while most are keen for someone to help bees recover, they don’t want to be around bees (including my neighbours!). However, at the workshop I learnt that cities, so typically human spaces, have now become more hospitable for bees than the open countryside, because they provide a variety of vegetation from gardens which bees need but which the country has lots due to extensive farming. So, ironically, it seem that finding ways of bringing people to share the same spaces with and acquiring proper awareness of bees has become almost a necessity for the sake of humanity as well as the bees themselves. This seems to me an opportunity for participatory research to widen the focus from co-designing with bees individual hives (as we saw that some researchers have done) to co-designing with humans and bees new ways of constructing space-sharing and mutual awareness abilities and practices at a systemic level, to create new hybrid urban models. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology is rapidly transforming the model of the city into that of the ‘smart city’…perhaps in this transition, intertwined with the smart city of humans, we will also see the emergence of the ‘smart city of bees’.
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