TREES

In my work I tend to work through an ethnographic lens, situating small moments of meaning making within cultures and contexts, over time, with an attention to reflexivity and collective thinking (Campbell and Lassiter 2015). This work requires an attention to ‘small stories’ (Gorgakopolou 2008) and moments within meaning making when children and young people articulate something, or describe the world in a new way. I see the actions of young people as inherently hopeful, although what they say can be less so. Hope here is actualised in the small, particular moments, when a child might look at the skyline and observe a crane, or will look up and measure a tree. In Peter Kraftl’s words:  …the task is to understand how hope is figured through the matters, routines, and practices of everyday lives—in this case, those of young people. (Kraftl 2008:86) This idea of hope is situated in the lived moment of the everyday, and in that sense, hope is a precarious space (Nunn et al 2021). Mome...

  I had a thought today but as I'm not really blogging at the moment I can't think of anywhere to write but here. Its about trees so its ok and its also about research creation as I'm trying to tighten up the chapter in my PhD. So I'm thinking of doing my festival of the mind project and I'm going to be listening to trees and part of this is performance and part of it is real as trees do make sound and capture sounds so we have something to listen to which is real.  If we take a tradition research question orientated approach we could ask.   If young people are asked to imagine that trees can speak what kind of voice would they imagine and how does this "voice reflect their inner feelings and concerns about the environment?   Or we could go more methodological.   How does working with creative research methods that stimulate young peoples imaginations help us to understand the lived experience of marginalized young people and their engagement with global warmin...

 Is this what we are doing then - trying to work out how to communicate some of the science and enable young people to remain hopeful .    Do we want them to be hopeful so they can live their lives or so they will make change? The one thing I took from new - materialism via Barad was the idea that we are the natural world - we are not separate from it so we cannot destroy it or save it. We can only shape what we are part of. New materialism puts you in the middle of things along with everything else- this is ontological and not epistemological  hence the coining of the phrase Onto-epitomology  where we don't get to be on the outside of anything.   This feeling that humans - us,we, them, they, I are part of nature - not in a back to nature way but is a WE ARE NOT GOD way  - it is not up to us to save the world and this saving may be impossible - we have no ability to save it .We are not custodians for future generations we are part of the planet an...

 . .. the heat made everything different, the atmosphere loaded with fear and the climate scientists were all over twitter saying I Told You So.  I had a good chat with Simon about climate science- he said the problem with climate science is that it is too abstract, it doesn't put the concrete and everyday into the work, but just presents it. What is lacking is lived experience. I cited Peter's article when he says:       the task is to understand how hope is figured through the matters, routines, and practices of everyday           lives—in this case, those of young people. (Kraftl 2008:86) What it made me think about is the mechanisms of how we live our lives need to intertwine with climate science in a way that is more lived, more experiential and more socially linked.  This is the river where I swam - it is also the river where the young men came and recorded their sound scapes as part of the Voices of the Future proje...

 I keep wondering why I never feel very comfortable when we talk about voices of the future in relation to the project as a whole.  On the news this morning there was a feature about feeding grey squirrels contraceptives in hazelnuts so all the new forests can flourish.  I wondered what we would make of this on the trees project, if it was the right or the wrong thing to do.  The grey squirrel is none native and invasive so we would struggle to find a language to discuss this and have a discussion where we try and find appropriate language to discuss  this. My feeling is that the issue is something to do with scale.  scale in terms of the body, in terms of time, in  terms of size and in terms of possibilities.  I think that this is the thing that troubles me and I would like to get an idea of the scales we are working on.  Perhaps this is the next question art or me as artist in residence can ask the team.  The 200 years idea was a scale...

 I feel like I have been away for ages. Aberdeen was great and felt like an old school residential.  It was interesting because it proved again that we need to go away to be together, there actually isn't really a shortcut.  Even the terrible food in the hotel became part of things, gave us something to bond together other.  The story of sneaking out for Dutch chips and eaten them by the dock is as important as anything we actually said in the stuffy meeting room. I am always happy when I understand what a project is for and I think we are getting closer to understanding what voices of the futures is for.  Perhaps we should start to try and do the paragraph in the lift the Steve Jobs summing up as my brother would say.  Its one of the things we seem to be terrible at in universities especially the humanities. Here goes from what I know :- 'Voices of the futures is a project about education and learning. It focuses on listening to young peoples voices ideas,...