The tree meetings

 

Yesterday felt like a big day for the Trees project. 

First we had a great meeting about David and Chris's project - they are working with the Portico Library, Special Collections, the North-West Film Archive and the City Art Gallery. We had a discussion about whether this was a project about place or Trees but in the end we decided it was both. Having place as a focus made it distinct from the other projects, which was good. 

We also talked very concretely about the bursaries for teachers and subject English and subject science and how we could re-invigorate both of them. We discussed this article: by Liz de Frietas. She is discussing the limitations of sensor technology, but also some of the things it does. This is her argument: 

The EDA data points to our biochemical relationality, our bioaffective dispersal. This new empiricism binds multi-scalar subjects (human and non-human) together in reconfigured modes of existence, transforming human experience. We need to develop ways of studying the expanded sensory contact that characterizes this new way of life.

She also writes this: My hope is to trigger new experiments in education in which EDA data might be conceived differently, not only in terms of biomarkers of personalized affect, but as evidence of a worldly sensibility that reckons with the dispersal of the bounded organism. 

She argues that: These EDA devices help us track the provisional ground of embodiment, but also the distributed and differential nature of individuation.

This is similar to Peter Kraftl's argument in the 'After Childhood' book that the connections between plastics and human children needs to be re-thought

 She says that: I see a need to shift the focus from theories of agent-centred perceptual capacities to theories of worldly sensibility and ‘environmentality’. these theoretical moves are driven by an ecological politics that has yet to really displace the human,

I also like this article.  This does explicitly say this about physical science: Haunting these efforts is the fact that science often acts as handmaiden to industry and colonial acquisition. The old “white geologies” and biologies encode within them an extractive and enslaving logic, mobilized against racialized people and nonhuman animals (Yusoff, 2019).

They say this: What new forms of empirical inquiry will emerge in these complex circumstances? As culture and media theorist Kara Keeling (2019) states in Queer times, black futures, “Working with and through scientific and technical knowledge in the service of humanistic inquiry is a challenge of world historical significance” (p. 195). Keeling turns to the power of speculative and poetic thought in her work, exploring how speculative thought operates in diverse contexts—in scientific laboratories, artistic studios, financial think tanks, and fiction workshops. In this article, we also turn to speculative thought, and like Keeling we turn to fiction as a way of imagining alternative forms of empirical inquiry. Speculative fiction (SF) often presents cosmic remixings of the socio-material sciences, thereby helping us to imagine a future empiricism for earthbound “terrans” who have forgotten that their planetary dwelling is also a living creature.

I used to find this kind of sentence annoying but now I think we need it - have I changed?

Our focus is on how examples of SF pursue an ecological cosmic sympathy between human and nonhuman, and how close readings of these texts allow scholars to think creatively about new kinds of inquiry in the Anthropocene.

The article itself is trying to trouble the language of science through queering science fiction. I really like it but it comes back to the conundrum that was raised yesterday - we are working to re-forest the North of England and the science is important - how can we try and use this language to deconstruct it when it might be all we have in the end to combat climate change. This is getting all a bit speculative. 

We were good though.