TREES

 I am reading Sarah Truman's new book on Research Creation - it is the one I decided to read after reading After Childhood by Peter Kraftl and Language in a Globalised World by Khawla Badwan. Both Peter and Khawla in their books are saying basically that constructs like childhood and language are not helpful particularly for young people in multilingual and diverse contexts. Sarah's book is nice as it feels both familiar and helpful-she treats you like a doctoral student and takes you by the hand and tells you how it feels to do research-creation.  I got to this footnote and then I wanted to blog:  Because of this, you might wonder (I’m currently wondering) why I didn’t write this section before the ‘situated speculation’ section above? How could the ‘situated’ person speculate if they haven’t come into being just yet, or are constantly emerging? I didn’t write it above because I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive or linear but because of how research projects run (wi...

 It was a good conversation this morning about the tree project.   It was good as I held my ground and was clear about my position in relation to my role.  I had made the decision about making films with young people in after the last Odd film making process. It seemed unethical as we couldn't show any of the films at the conference even though that was actually why we told the kids we were making them- the reason for them. I have also spent far too long worrying a circula problem when the situation is actually very clear :- Any images that includes a young person face is considered sensitive data and has to be treated legally as such. This makes the kind of film making I do with young people very difficult .  In a very real way the protection of what is considered data makes a free flow of ideas communication and sharing in co-produced video impossible.  If some young people are given a real choice, for example a decision about how something is used then t...

 We went to Seymour Park on Monday. We walked from Brooks, me, Abi and Jennifer.  We wanted tree wisdom but instead we found our favourite trees. My favourite was Manchester Plane. When we got to the school Caitlin and Khawla were there. This is their version of your Adventure Playground, the community garden. It looks over the patch of land that will become the first treescape planted by the project. Caitlin and Khawla's kids told me what they wanted to see there. Dave came and talked about community art. He is running workshops in year 3. It feels both very familiar and different at the same time, I am not sure why.  Perhaps play is also important also the sites and spaces generating the thinking but climate change gives it a different feel. COP26 is going to be a disaster and we need to keep working on this project. Perhaps weshould just call it playing.

    I enjoyed watching the tree movies - it somehow feels good to have them all - these are the many starting points.  Everything felt quite safe in a good way apart from Johan's talk that suggested the future didn't exist so science could not have it. We pull the future back to us and invent it but only in the future we also invent the past of a childhood which never existed to propel us forward.  It feels that although trees may have more going on about them than we previously thought they probably don't do this. The thing I felt as I watched the talks unfold was something about where we humans sit within all this, the thoughts that jarred and flowed and connected.  I will bullet point a couple for discussion later. 1. The struggle between individual and collective responsibility for the coming storm. 2. The individual nature of experience - we notice the impact of climate change but we notice through how it is represented as a global thing not locally.  ...

The retreat was nice, it was just so amazing to be with real people in this beautiful landscape.  What I learned from the retreat: 1. Transdisciplinary work is hard but important for the project.  2. Aberdeen is very far away but it will be the next place where we meet.  3. Trees look lovely but they do lots of other things besides. 4. The team is large but manageable when you think about the work packages and key themes.  5. Threading all these themes together will be hard but they are great themes: Trees, Childhood, Hope, Landscape and Identity and Co-production.  When you have watched the videos it would be good to know what you think.  Also, we had a lot of fun. We missed you.   

 I am thinking about my presentation for the residential.  It feels like it will end up involving identity, how we present ourselves.  I have not really done very much like this for a while, none of us have, so I am expecting us all to be a little bit nervous.  As I write this I am listening too the ERA conference in the background and wondering how my life has got ensnared by academic discourse.  In some ways there wasn't anywhere else for me to go but there is something about the focus on language as a mode of representation that will never sit easily with me. I decided that to introduce something about Collage as I found this poster that I made in Venice and it reminded me that collage is really cool when working with people who may or may not feel comfortable with other forms of expressive making.  I started to think about what isn't held within the notion of collage that isn't present within the concept of agencement or assemblage. One issue is the po...

 The retreat is close upon us and I am excited and nervous about choreographing and holding together a big group of people. We are watching 'The Chair' and it reminds me of being Head of ESRI and having to work with people as people and go with who they are. In Dorset I held these Shed Events: 1. One with Naturalist Sean and his partner Lynn who is a Dormice specialist and their daughter who rescues animals and my aunt Margaret and me and Molly and Joy. We had vegetarian Chili to eat,  and in the middle of eating Sean went rushing into the wood and said, Kate, this is why I love this wood, this is a coppiced Ash that was coppiced over a hundred years ago. It is still alive and not dying like many of the Ash Trees in this wood. We went over and it was there, like a cave but still growing.  2. One with Bill and Rebecca to say thank you - I gave Bill Jon Drori Around the World in 80 Trees and the Richard Mabey book on trees and Feral by George Monbiot. We ate kebabs and Bill...

 These are the trees in the cemetery where people train  fighting dogs by hanging them from their teeth to strengthen their jaws.  The trees are struggling to survive as the bark, in places,  is stripped all the way around. Some have died.  Each year they start to recover a bit but then on a single night or perhaps two they all get ravaged by dogs again.  In their ragged state they seem to stand for something, something negative and gratuitous.  People post about them on Facebook pages, they are a symbol of a decline into something less than human, a disregard for nature and the dignity of trees.  The problem for me is the cemetery as well as been filled with dead people is often full with ravaged people. Ravaged for all sorts of reasons, whether illness, addiction, loss of hope or just a general flatness in  the way things turned out.   People tend to make less of a fuss about the ravaged people than the trees unless they find them...