Mastery

 I think that on the trees project we should grow disciplines. Like two conquers in a single shell, they push together and change each others shape.  When you crack a conquer you are never sure if you will get one big one or two sharing.

I was interested in how we talked about mastery at the meeting today in the context of Abi's planned work in Rotherham.  I know what it means from a feminist-eco-new-materialist perspective, although I may be wrong. I therefore have had a go at a summary:-

New materialism replaced old materialism to an extent because it flattens the ontology of human with the world in general. there  can still have categories but they avoid hierarchies.  The human body and mind are not distinct we are bodies without souls, or separate minds we are just flesh.  This helps us to think of people as part of and not separate too the world.  We cannot master something we are part of.  It provides the strong connections and evolution of new materilist thinking into the after-the-human.  Humanism establishes us as separate.  It also connects with many indigenous ontological proposition where we are situated within and of the world which flows through everything in all its relations.  

This position is established as an alternative to humanism and as humanism grew out of enlightenment works with science but does not fully accept sopme of sciences core principles .

Queer - post human - feminist new materialism and to an extent much post -structuralism comes into focus when we see it through the lens of accepted wisdom and authorized discourse. We assume that this is positivist scientific male and white oriented episto-ontology or onto-epistomolgy and often this is to an extent correct. Scientific thinking and ways of knowing dominate what Rancierre would call the sensible and distribute it when and where science want people to follow. 

On our tree project we have science that needs to measure and we have actions.  We have young people and co-production we have different disciplines all built on different foundations.  Some foundations are questioned and others not, some foundations are built just to question other foundations. 

When we talk of mastery I wonder if instead of opening Pandora's box of hope as Johan would say.  Instead of thinking through mastery from different perspectives we go back to the conquer and say - inside this space before we emerge in our glorious and waxy shades of brown what can we take from our collective ideas of mastery that will help us grow together within the shell of our project.  When we come out we may be one big conquer or more likely two conquers but we will be conquers we will be similar and we will of grown together.