Primary ZOOM link information (all plenary sessions):
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ubc.zoom.us/j/4481568135?pwd=QVFiZXlUSm5iYnFaU2ZZMVFKRGpudz09
Meeting ID: 448 156 8135
Passcode: 002617
Full schedule (times/dates) here.
23 May: Introductory Lecture
ASTRIDA NEIMANIS
What is Feminist Environmental Humanities?
ABSTRACT: This introductory lecture will introduce the symposium and set the scene for our time together. As background, Astrida will provide a short introductory lecture on feminist environmental humanities – which may or may not be a research field! We will discuss…
BIO: Astrida Neimanis is the Director of the FEELed Lab, working on unceded syilx territories at the UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, BC.
Required reading:
- Hamilton, JM and Neimanis, A. “Five desires, five demands.” Australian Feminist Studies, 2020.
- Watts, V. “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!)” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 2, No. 1, 2013, pp. 20-34
DAY ONE LINKS AND FILES:
23 May: Keynote Workshop
AM KANNGIESER
Sensing, attuning and noticing: listening to environments
ABSTRACT: How with live in the world is always interdependent and situated within environments and place. Listening is a way of feeling into these relations. Listening is not only about aural hearing it is about sensing, attuning and noticing. In this session, participants will be asked to undertake a daily listening and writing/ reflection practice for four days to connect to where they are and to try to become sensitive to how they relate to their surroundings, and
how their surroundings shift and change in relation to them.
BIO: AM Kanngieser is a geographer, sound artist and Marie Curie Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. They are the author of Experimental Politics
and the Making of Worlds (2013) and Between Sound and Silence: Listening towards Environmental Relations (forthcoming), and have published in a range of interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D. Their collaborative audio work has been featured on Documenta 14 Radio, BBC 3, ABC Radio National, The Natural History Museum London, Arts Centre Melbourne, Radio del Museo Reina Sofía and Deutschland Radio, and has been featured in international arts and music publications including The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music, Quietus, Transmediale, Outline and Art Quarterly magazines. https://amkanngieser.com
Required reading (3 short posts by AM Kanngieser):
- To tend for, to care with: three pieces on listening as method
https://theseedbox.se/blog/to-tend-for-to-care-with-three-pieces-on-listening-as-method/ - Listening as being-with
https://theseedbox.se/blog/listening-as-being-with/ - Listening as taking-leave
https://theseedbox.se/blog/listening-as-taking-leave/
Workshop Instructions
Container Meditation
24 May: Keynote Lecture
CAMILA MARAMBIO AND ARIEL BUSTAMANTE
Peatland Enchantment
ABSTRACT: Peatlands challenge us to create a new, turbid, layered and multivocal aesthetic that highlights the stories of the Patagonian peat bogs and emphasizes their role as Southern bastions of vitality in the face of climate change.” This line from the curatorial text for Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia (curated by Camila Marambio and featuring artist Ariel Bustamante, among others),
will be the springboard into an exploration of multivocality as a mode of attunement and listening that attempts to stretch beyond self-representation. The State of Being Heard is the nationality that Camila and Ariel claim and share.
BIO: Camila Marambio is a letter writing curator who delights in telling ancient circular stories and is concerned with human/non-human health. In 2010 she founded the nomadic research program Ensayos on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, at the Southernmost tip of Patagonia. Ensayos brings together artists, scientists, activists, policy makers and local community members to exercise speculative and emergent forms of eco-cultural ethics at the world’s end. Work from Ensayos includes a web series, a listening series, a scent, a periodical, experimental performance and has been presented in exhibitions at the New Museum of Art, New York; Tenerife Espacio de Artes, Canarias; Institute for Art and Olfaction,
Los Angeles; Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York; Kurant, Tromsø, Norway; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Puerto de Ideas, Valparaíso; Festival Cielos del Infinito, Puerto Williams, CL.
She is the curator of Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia, and in 2020 she was guest curator of the Extended Research Project at the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America of the Museum of Modern for which she conceived the Aconcagua Summit. Camila was a Postdoctoral
Fellow of The Seedbox: an environmental humanities collaboratory, Linkoping University, Sweden (2022). She holds a PhD in Curatorial Practice from Monash University, Australia (2019), a Master of Experiments in Arts and Politics from Science Po (2012) and an MA
in Modern Art: Critical Studies from Columbia University (2004).
Camila is co-author of the books Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja with Cecilia Vicuña (Errant Bodies Press, 2019), the forthcoming book Sandcastles: A Planetary Ethics of Softness with Nina Lykke,
and collaborates regularly with the sound artist Ariel Bustamante.
BIO: Ariel Bustamante is a self-taught artist based in La Paz/Bolivia. His practice concentrates on long-term processes of both craftsmanship and subaltern research. Based on the physical and
cosmo-practical aspects of listening and attending, Bustamante produces complex auditory spaces informed by collaborative methods of inquiry. Bustamante is a member of the Multispecies Ontology Laboratory at the Institute of Anthropological and Archeological Research at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia. Before moving to Bolivia he lived in Finland. During his two-year residency at Aalto University, Bustamante worked at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Department of Media.
The result of the residency, the comprehensive communal soundtrack “Why Do We Do the Things We Do?”, consists of a series of self-reflective verbal encounters between two or more individuals facilitated by a sculpture built to enable vulnerability.
Reading/Listening Homework:
- Robin Wall Kimmerer “The Red Sneaker” (“Draft of Sphagnum Essay”)
- Ana Maria Ochoa, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in 19th Century Colombia (Introduction)
- Rumors: https://turbatol.org/rumors.html (6 short sound pieces)
DAY TWO LINKS AND FILES:
Day 2 Chat Transcript – Astrida’s Seminar Group
25 May: Homework Day
No lecture/seminar. Participants will be invited to sign up for an (optional) meeting with one of the facilitators.
26 May: Keynote Lecture
JANELLE BAKER
Landscapes that Listen
ABSTRACT: I will describe my experiences collaborating on ethnobiological and culturally grounded environmental monitoring with First Nations in Alberta about how the many beings that make up a landscape listen, and pay attention, to what humans do. Humans, as messier, louder, beings have a lot of work to do to show the living landscape respect. In this lecture, I will share messy stories of how the landscape can hear and observe humans and how sakâwiyiniwak (Northern Bush Cree) interpret responses, reciprocity, and retribution from the sentient landscape.
BIO: Janelle Baker is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Athabasca University in northern Alberta, Canada. Janelle is the North Americas Representative on the Board of Directors for the
International Society of Ethnobiology and a Co-Editor of Ethnobiology Letters, a diamond openaccess online peer-reviewed journal. She is the winner of the 2019 Canadian Association for
Graduate Studies – ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences category.
Required Reading:
- Janelle Baker “Do Berries Listen? Berries as Indicators, Ancestors, and Agents in Canada’s Oil Sands Region.”
- Janelle Baker “Bear Stories in the Berry Patch.”
DAY 3 CHAT TRANSCRIPT FROM ASTRIDA’S SEMINAR
27 May: Littoral Listening Session
No lecture/seminars. Participants are invited to take part in the FEELed Lab’s monthly “Littoral Listening” reading/listening group session. More information can be found here.
Participants will also be invited to sign up for an (optional) meeting with one of the facilitators.
30 May: Individual Offerings and Debrief with AM Kanngieser
Transcript from the plenary (and from Astrida’s seminar discussion)
31 May: Individual Offerings and Final Plenary
FEELed Lab Blog: Plenary Jamboard link is here! Please offer something up for our blog/archive post!
Survey: We invite you to offer some responses to the symposium here
Stay in touch: Here is the google doc where we can (confidentially) share email and postal addresses, and links to our work.
Co-creation! And here is the Google Doc where we will provide 200-250 words (or equivalent) in response to the question “What does listening hold?” (by 30 June 2022 please). If you want to include other kinds of files please put them in this folder.
Chat transcripts from our last meeting are here (plenary and Astrida’s seminar).
Follow up Links:
Invitation to a WhatsApp Group from Margarida: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HBoPGQY8ejh0MAC7XK7o4g
Link to collaborative document “What does listening hold?”
Link to page with participant info page with addresses, project information about participants, etc.
If you still haven’t filled in the feedback survey, we welcome your thoughts here!
23 May – 1 June: Seminars and Individual Meetings
Facilitated by Laura McLauchlan & Astrida Neimanis
SIGN UP LINK FOR SESSIONS WILL BE LIVE HERE BY FRIDAY 20 MAY.
BIO: Laura McLauchlan is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW. She is also a lecturer with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Her work focuses both on sociocultural inheritances that can block connection to other lives, as well as on marginal and emergent ontologies and practices within mainstream science and policy worlds that might allow for greater responsiveness to the interconnection of life.
BIO: Astrida Neimanis is the Director of the FEELed Lab, working on unceded syilx territories at the UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, BC.
The FEELed lab 