Paper short abstract:

Can a new thinking of human identity and agency derive from the technological expansion of the senses, that connect us with the environment? In my talk I will look at experimental design examples that built hybrid environments, experience spaces that confront us with crisis and alien forms of life.

Paper long abstract:

In scaling, scripting, merging our bodily experience of nonhuman entities, and interconnecting us with other spheres (such as the hydrosphere), nonhuman agents and novel objects, the human self can be experienced as world-involving, as a trans-species identity. In my presentation I want to look at artistic and design examples, that tackle the break-down of obsolete dichotomies between human an environment, in highlighting the flesh as the area of interconnection, of interfacing with the nonhuman Other and the inhuman in ourselves. The flesh, understood in the way as Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, connects us with the world and becomes a space for negotiating identity and scopes for action.

In looking at examples from environmental, experimental architectural design, that use novel materials with emergent properties or computation in order to open up new interactions with our environment, I want to take a look on the ways the human body is brought back into the discourse around the Anthropocene, new technologies and posthuman identities - not as a mere tool but as the initial source of experience. I will also point out to what extend conventional hierarchies are re-inscribed into the phenomenal experience spaces that are created, and in what ways issues of non-human agency, inter-object-relations, and autonomous systems are taken into account

Paper short abstract:

The starting-point of this paper is a case-study of a staged rainforest at a public aquarium with the purpose to engage visitors in topics of science and conservation. The aim is to discuss the multiple ways that knowledge of nature and environmental issues is intermediated.

Paper long abstract:

Rainforests makes a good start for a discussion of the Anthropocene. Deforestation has crucial implications for all species dwelling in the rainforest. This goes for plants and non-human-animals as well as for humans. On a more general level rainforest-products are part of most western-homes and the devastated rainforest has global implications. One approach to the question of the Anthropocene is to investigate the intermediaries that convey knowledge and information on the topic. A particular place for this is the public aquarium. In parallel to a more general environmental awareness, aquariums have changed their assignments from showing exotic animals to market themselves as facilities of conservation and knowledge-production.

This paper explores the processes of distributing knowledge of nature and environmental issues. The purpose is to discuss an ethnographic approach and a theoretical tool-kit enabling understandings of the multiple ways that knowledge on the rainforest is intermediated through living material, soundscapes, written words and story-telling. The starting-point is a case study of a staged rainforest at a science-center/aquarium in Gothenburg/Sweden. Here, the purpose is to engage visitors in topics of science and conservation. The staged habitat is made out of living plants, sounds, animals, it is humid and warm. By experiencing this environment, reading posters and following guided tours, the visitors are supposed to understand and gain an empathy with the environmental challenges raised by deforestation and production of palm-oil; hopefully changing both the way they relate to the rainforest and their consumption-routines. How can ethnographically-based methods make these multiple-sensual practices understandable?

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to explore methodologies for an ethnography that captures the complex relationship to “the-more-than-human” in the Anthropocene era. The presentation will be based on a study of birdwatching and draw on a theoretical model of non-human charisma.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores methodologies that can be used to capture the multifaceted relations between humans and other animals. I will draw on examples from a multi-sited ethnography approach in my current PhD project about birdwatching in Sweden. The concept of non-human charisma has been proposed as a model to investigate contemporary environmentalism and the complex relations to "the-more-than-human" in the Anthropocene era (Lorimer 2015). Charismatic species often refer to familiar and aesthetically salient organisms that stimulate public affection. However, alongside aesthetic charisma, Jamie Lorimer has suggested two additional types of charisma, one that refers to the material properties of an organism and another that refers to the feelings induced in close multisensory interspecies encounters. The latter is termed "corporeal charisma" and will be a starting point of my presentation.

Birdwatching is an increasing leisure time activity focused on watching and listening to birds in order to identify various species in different environments. In doing so birdwatchers follow seasonal bird migration and breeding. Some birdwatchers visit the same areas frequently throughout their lifetime, and witness recurrent and yet unpredictable environmental changes. In that sense birdwatching is a way of dwelling with and within "the-more-than-human" in the Anthropocene. The purpose of this paper is to discuss methodologies that enable an exploration of this kind of dwelling, through the concept of non-human charisma and a multi-sited fieldwork in diverse places such as commercial bird fairs, social media, nature reserves and industrial ponds.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I present three ethnographic vignettes that explore acts of listening to “milieu” in France, Morocco and Sweden. With these vignettes, I demonstrate that sentient and non-sentient ethnographic subjects emerge not in milieu, but with milieu, thus reorienting ethnography and its “object.”

Paper long abstract:

Moroccan poet Idriss Aissa writes, "Our relation to place is irrational. There are things that surpass reason therein. There always remains an unknown and invincible power (magnetism, magic, gravity…) that ties us to a path, a dwelling, a city, a country-side, a hidden place in a residence, in a garden. ...We are secret characters in a grand and multi-century story that places are recounting."

What stories do places recount and how might the ethnographer better listen? As humans recognize a more humble place in planetary politics (Bennett 2009; Morton 2013), ethnographers have begun listening not just to people, but to the milieu they inhabit (Helmreich 2016; Kohn 2013). Milieus have atmospheres, chemical compositions, climates, rhythms, that are unique to each, but that also help create the things, people, plants and animals that inhabit them. They leave material sediment in the strata of conscious and unconscious memory. The French refer to this as terroir, the effects of local minerals and climate on things produced by the land. If terroir determines not just how things "taste" but their very genetic particularity, and if people are what they eat and breathe, then it makes sense to talk about the intimate inter-being of the botanical and the social ecology.

In this paper, I present three ethnographic vignettes that explore acts of listening to "milieu" in France, Morocco and Sweden. With these vignettes, I demonstrate that sentient and non-sentient ethnographic subjects emerge not in milieu, but with milieu, reorienting ethnography and its "object."