This FEELed Note was written by FEELed Lab administrator Julia Jung.
Thank you so much everyone who joined our 5-year event on March 27th! There were over ~60 people who popped in and out during the day, joined the Keynote event, hosted a workshop or set up a self-led activities. We are so grateful for you and your presence in the FEELed Lab community!
We started the day with workshops on Access & Inclusion (led by Jenica Frisque) and shifting from white settler environmentalism to solidarity with syilx sovereignty (led Erin Delfs) followed by community lunch and many self-led activities to choose from with information about all our past projects.
We are grateful to Amy and Evgenii from the Center for Climate Justice, Vancouver, who led a station on writing a climate justice postcard to our local representatives.
Two of our climate solutions scholars, Estraven and Jamie, who are working on addressing polarization through arts‐led social infrastructures set up a podcasting booth in the schoolhouse. Their podcast “Otherwise: Polarized” is currently in production – stay tuned!
A highlight of the afternoon was the unearthing of Norah Bowman’s book Breath Like Water that was buried in 2023, as an experiment in trying to understand the idea of “land as library.”
We were amazed to find that the book had almost completely disappeared, only a few pages and the cover remained. This led us to acknowledging and celebrating this process of transformation with an impromptu earth ritual.
Continuing the focus on spending time with our hands in the ground, we are so grateful and excited for the new FEELed Lab garden! Jamie Stevens, Ponderosa Education Community and some of our regulars from the Plant People Gatherings led a planting activity on the flower beds around the lab using native wildflowers.
Our keynote conversation “multibeing eddies in a global churn” between FEELed Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Sue Reid and globally renown feminist and queer ecologies scholar Professor Catriona Sandilands concluded our day.
Both talks took us on unexpected global windy journeys. Cate continued our gardening/ hands in the dirt theme with her talk about the origins, entanglements and queer ecology of rhubarb. Sue moved not only our minds but also our bodies by evoking the journeys of plankton across our ocean and invited us to drift throughout the talk.
We learned so much, but one lesson that stood out for me and one other audience member was that drifting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So, here’s to 5 more years of drifting, planting, reading, eating and building community ❤
The FEELed lab 