Embodying Animism in the Academy

• In Event: 72.065 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 72.065-10 - Taking the Animist Turn in Environmental Education?

Abstract

Objectives
Using autoethnography and collective dialogue, this session will open space for critical consideration of the place of animism in our field. We will invite symposium attendees to consider whether or not we as a field are adequately prepared and willing to make an ‘animist turn,’ and if so, what is needed – in our practices, our journals, and our languages, and our ethics – to support it. This session addresses issues of voice, justice and ethics with respect to marginalized knowledges, peoples and other-than-human beings.

Overview
Animism, the practice of relating to the more-than-human as active, communicating subjects, provides an alternative to anthropocentrism and the treatment of nature as object (Stuckey, 2010). In environmental education, the topics of animism and the agency of the more-than-human world still represent a host of questions that may be difficult, uncomfortable, and go to the heart of what our field claims to be about. Yet, many of us involved in environmental education – whether as researchers or as educators – are closet animists; we experience, but hesitate to publically share, particularly in academic settings, our deepest felt sense of interconnectivity and participation with the animate world. Part of this inhibition has to do with the fact that animism goes against cultural norms derived from a modern Western worldview and normative academic traditions, including materialism, empiricism and rationalism. Naming oneself as an animist and scholar remains a counter-hegemonic act. As Manes (1995) points out, in modern Western culture to say ‘nature speaks to me’ strikes most people as “semipsychotic” (p.18; see also, Bai, 2013; Barrett, 2013; Jensen, 2004; Plumwood, 2000). Thus our aim is to collectively, with participation from the session attendees and the more-than-human participants that have accompanied them, consider what is needed from of ourselves, and from our field, for an animist turn – and whether we are prepared to take it.

Scholarly Significance
As a subjugated knowledge, animism offers potential for destabilizing the dominant and increasingly problematic ways of knowing characterized by an object-oriented (in contrast to the relational) ontology and atomistic mode of thinking. And as an environmental knowledge, animism provides a way forward in a time of ecological crisis by re-establishing humans’ profound interconnectivity and interdependence with the non-human worlds. If we take seriously the perception that the more-than-human is capable of communication on a literal level and is thus capable of participating as a ‘co-educator’ and ‘co-researcher,’ this will demand a radical re-consideration of how we talk about, teach, research with, relate to the more-than-human.

Structure
The session will be a synergistic co-creation of the human and more-than-human animate beings present in the room at the time of the symposium. Presenters will each speak from “their animist selves” and invite audience participants to do the same. We will bring, and invite participants to either select from our ‘basket’ or bring themselves, a more-than-human companion to accompany them throughout the session – be that soil, plants, stones, and so forth. Specific questions will then be posed to lead to an innovatively interactive experience for participants.

Author

• M.J. Barrett, University of Saskatchewan