Abstract:
The anthropogenic environmental emergency necessitates novel approach to methods of knowledge creation and engagement that offer insights into human and more-than-human relationality. Much of the current environmental education research is situated within humanist approaches, in which individuals are assumed to be ontologically distinct, pre-existing, agential subjects (Barad, 2007). Within these western approaches, difference is essentialized and often hierarchically ordered. This body of research does not fully attend to the Indigenous and more recent posthuman contributions that highlight the dynamic, fluid, and intra-dependent connections between bodies in which the “other” is not entirely separate from the “self” (Cajete, 2005; Dolphijn, & van der Tuin, 2012). Nor does it recognize that our very being is continually re/defined through a shifting web of connections.
Within this presentation we examine the political ontology of the research image through a decolonial lens and explore how we might develop methods that more clearly illuminate the entangled nature of people and other beings. The word “image” stems from the Latin word imaginem, which connotes both representational assumptions ("copy, imitation, likeness; statue,”), as well as more emergent hauntings ("phantom, ghost, apparition”) (Etymonline, 2024). It is more than visual, and also more than representational. Within the context of this work, the image is broadly understood to include both audio and visual renderings
Using new technologies including drone footage, thermal imaging, film and audio recordings, we endeavour to participate in knowledge creation that engages audiences in what emerges in the spaces across and in-between diverse bodies. Examples include the participation of wind and cedar in research documentation, the creation of soundscapes in which the anthrophony becomes a biophony, and thermal imag(in)ings in which the bodies of children are indistinguishable from the bodies of other beings, such as rivers and trees. Through these experimental methods, the sameness across bodies (that are usually juxtaposed) is illuminated, humans are decentred, and complex relations between humans and more-than-humans becomes more visible. These images provide opportunities for collective visual thinking, and create educative spaces for trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2011) learning.
References
Alaimo, S. (2011). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana:
Indiana Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cajete, G. (1995). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. New Mexico:
Clearlight Books.
Dolphijn, R. & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Open
Humanities Press.
Within this presentation we examine the political ontology of the research image through a decolonial lens and explore how we might develop methods that more clearly illuminate the entangled nature of people and other beings. The word “image” stems from the Latin word imaginem, which connotes both representational assumptions ("copy, imitation, likeness; statue,”), as well as more emergent hauntings ("phantom, ghost, apparition”) (Etymonline, 2024). It is more than visual, and also more than representational. Within the context of this work, the image is broadly understood to include both audio and visual renderings
Using new technologies including drone footage, thermal imaging, film and audio recordings, we endeavour to participate in knowledge creation that engages audiences in what emerges in the spaces across and in-between diverse bodies. Examples include the participation of wind and cedar in research documentation, the creation of soundscapes in which the anthrophony becomes a biophony, and thermal imag(in)ings in which the bodies of children are indistinguishable from the bodies of other beings, such as rivers and trees. Through these experimental methods, the sameness across bodies (that are usually juxtaposed) is illuminated, humans are decentred, and complex relations between humans and more-than-humans becomes more visible. These images provide opportunities for collective visual thinking, and create educative spaces for trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2011) learning.
References
Alaimo, S. (2011). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana:
Indiana Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cajete, G. (1995). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. New Mexico:
Clearlight Books.
Dolphijn, R. & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Open
Humanities Press.