THINKING WITH WATER AND PLASTIC: REIMAGINING ECOLOGICAL RELATIONS

wet rocks in a shallow stream are entangled with a piece of white and blue plastic

WHEN: Monday 18 March 3:30 – 5 pm

WHERE: ART 281, UBCO Campus

WHAT: Double Lecture and Discussion with Dr. Alex Berry and Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp, with Q&A moderated by Dr. Astrida Neimanis. All welcome!

Part 1: Weaving Plastic Pedagogies with Young Children in the Ecuadorian Andes (Dr. Alex Berry)

In the Ecuadorian Andes, weaving is a millennial practice, an economic livelihood, a language, and a worldview. Within an educational project that seeks to inherit the explosive growth of plastic waste with young children, weaving becomes a way of thinking about and creating pedagogies that are situated within longstanding folds of Andean memory and ongoing contemporary improvisations.

Alex Berry is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and The FEELed Lab at UBCO. Her research is interested in creative and experimental methodologies for refiguring colonial projections of the Human in early childhood environmental education.

Part 2: Thinking with Water in Response to Rights of Nature (Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp)

When considering the global rise of rights of nature cases, it is interesting that many of them pertain to water bodies. Although this obviously has to do with the vital roles that rivers play in maintaining healthy ecosystems, the fluid, dynamic, and uncontrollable character of water paradoxically seems to resist such a rights-bearing role. How can we think with water in responding to the proliferation of rights – also the right to water?

Jasmijn, a woman with brown hair and bright lipstick, softly smiling while standing in front of water bundling ina green turtle neck and dark coat.

Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and visiting researcher at UBCO at The FEELed Lab. Her research focuses on anthropocentrism in human rights discourse and explores the interrelations between critical political and legal theory, ecology, and rights-based environmental protection.