As we welcome new people to the FEELed Lab, we want to make space for longer introductions to project team members and research affiliates joining us. This profile is on Laura McLauchlan, a visiting researcher leading a workshop for the Biodiversities of Gender Project.
1. Can you tell us about your work/research?
Increasingly, my work seeks to bring together the biological and cultural in aid of anti-polarisation efforts. This emerged from my own experiences of variously opening and shutting down in response to the views of others in studying hedgehog conservation (a real problem when being open to others is such a big part of being a “good” open anthropologist!). I’ve become fascinated by the ways in which feeling understood / being resonated with can help with opening to other views. So those are the questions I am wrestling with currently – with a focus on environmental and social justice groups in the US currently. While my background is in multispecies ethnography (and I keep coming back to environmental and interspecies questions), I’m currently training in somatic and relational neurobiological approaches to more generally understand the physiological aspects of connection across difference. So my core questions at this exact moment are things like: What happens when we start to pay attention to our bodily responses to each other? Can that help us to avoid becoming polarised? Even when we still might not agree? How do our nervous systems play a role in who our conception of who “us” is? And how can cultural and/or personal work shift that?
2. Why did you want to work with the FEELed Lab?
So many reasons! I’m really excited about the way that the FEELed Lab is able to pull together artistic and embodied approaches to think/feel about environmental change. That matters so much to me, particularly when so often work gets siloed. As a scholar who sometimes does drag, sometimes draws, sometimes does ethnography, sometimes looks at policy in order to explore the edges of possible connection and understanding across difference, it’s really exciting to be able to have a space to think and connect with other folks and to not have to leave some part of myself outside of the room. To connect with other folks who are similarly thinking/feeling in expansive ways about environmental matters is so exciting.
3. Why are expansive engagements with environmental issues important?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a phrase that came to me one night in one of those times when odd phrases come. It was that “this might take all of us”… with the “this” being I guess survival, you know, finding a way to have a planet that is liveable. And of course the “us” in this wants a great deal of teasing out and care. This phrase that “this might take all of us” of course reflects my anti-polarisation work, and how to make space for difference yet still have the possibility of cooperation. But it also has me thinking about each of “us”… that getting through these times to something generative might require that all of each of us, all of our different ways of knowing and all the different aspects of ourselves, get taken seriously… because, while I genuinely love the sciences (my first degrees were both in the sciences), I am also sure that not everything that matters can be known in such ways. So finding ways of really holding multiple ways of knowing and responding to environmental issues—in the ways that the FEELed Lab does so beautifully—isn’t just important, it’s vital.
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