Thinking spaces - people talking
I have been lucky enough to have lots of thinking spaces on the Tree project recently.
Here is a note of some of them:
1. Data analysis day. Last Friday, the Finding the Curriculum in the Trees team spent time looking at the audio and drawings the children from the Primary School made. We were really interested in the embodied funds of knowledge in the drawings and how the children re-imagined the way the field could look, with bees, insects rivers and trees all entangled in a new landscape.
2. The Critical Discussion Lab on Co-production was great. I loved how respectful people were. Co-production is best seen as a utopian stance - it enables a re-framing of knowledge, but as you said, it is not a toolkit or a how to. I loved listening to it.
3. Race, migration and identity. Yesterday we had a session on race, migration and identity - here are some of our notes. Manchester City of Trees came and the Chartered College of Teaching person and it was a really fun hour. We learned loads just be listening to each other talk.
This all made me think that dialogue is utopian, it is something to work towards. People talk about Trees talking but people talking is also important.
It was interesting going to both the seminar sessions this week - I had to drop out of other things as I am very busy - everything is in the air - I am juggling - spinning plates - performing. I like beeen artist in residence and trying to hold some kind of overview. This week everything seems trivial compared to the war so its hard to think about anything we do as been important. The forests will burn and the world may end even quicker than we thought. This is interesting in relation to Plenty Coups and radical hope the war brings us closer to existential crises and the normal systems that scaffold hope break down - we cannot imaging the future we are hoping for. Johan is very clever at finding a thinking tool to help us think forward. I am surprisingly skeptical at the moment I am trying CBT techniques to try and shake the feeling that the trees project is tokenism and a distraction from bigger issues. I know this emerges from the enormity of what is at stake and could be helped by finding something to grasp, and to do the stuff that more stuff will come from. I'm confident that in 10 million years the world will be covered in forest and we as a species will be utterly transformed - like the dinosaurs becoming birds. Perhaps it is having to engage with the science again and the realization that I am born into it, like a catholic born into the flesh of Christ. Science is the thing that is supposed to make sense of the world but like God does not have the capacity to sort everything out. I hope to be able to draw life size images of trees - I think I will enjoy this
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of hope against hope is helpful - radical hope. I am reading Anticipation Sustainability and Human Extinction which is calming me down. When I was 10 I wrote a poem about the end of the world - it ended with an empty black sky and I have lived with the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis all my life. We had the Protect and Survive leaflet where it said that we had to make a shelter from a table. That said, I had an almost serious conversation with a neighbour and colleague in Hebden Bridge on Friday about where the nearest nuclear bunker was. We decided that it was in my partner's cellar and if I tried to get there on my electric bike I would miss the 3 minute window they give you to find somewhere to go and be pulverised. I would be happy though for those 3 minutes on my electric bike as I love my electric bike. When I feel gloomy i go outside and I am basically pleased about trees as it is a hopeful project.
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