Between Ruins and Odd Hope: Multispecies Assemblages and Atmospheres in Research With Young People

• In Event: Participation in More-Than-Human Research: By Whom? For Whom?

Abstract

This presentation focuses on children’s and young people’s lives and experiences in the (post)pandemic moment and in the uneven environmental crises of the Anthropocene. The Covid-19 pandemic is revealing human entanglement with other-than-human beings and forces, but paradoxically, it has reinforced discourses of war, nation and boundary-making around the human individual (Fishel, 2017). The current environmental crisis is also a crisis of imagination and ontology, one that puts educational scholars and practitioners in need of collectively re-defining the notions of nature, culture, human and animal. For some scholars, there is “odd hope” nested in the call for new forms of representation and knowledge practices (Haraway et al., 2016). The purpose of this research is to work towards this scientific renewal together with young people by means of atmospheric ethnography and feminist storytelling, and to cultivate attentiveness to new kinds of hopeful multispecies collaborations in circumstances that Tsing (2015) might call ruins.

The research questions are: How do the changing relations between nature and culture become visible in the lives of young people at the moment? How do the new kinds of multispecies collaborations look like? How to begin to notice them and articulate them in educational practices and in the academy?

The concept of assemblage (Tsing, 2015) defines the approach and the structure of the research. This concept unsettles conventional ideas of participation, and allows developing generative knowledge practices that embrace complexity rather than furthering innocent imageries of human-nature connections. The logic of assemblage also resists pre-defined, linear models and human-only temporalities, as well as the belief that research could simply be “opened” for groups of animals or young people to participate (see Pedersen & Pini, 2017). On the other hand, assemblage as a structure for a project offers possibilities of creative research and experimentation. Furthermore, a focus on more-than-human atmospheres (Stewart, 2011) is used to examine the situated ways in which environmental emotions, place and time collide, and to attune to nontraditional encounters and entanglements between species.

The research takes place in educational environments that have been affected by the pandemic - in the “edges” and margins of formal and informal education - such as kindergartens, zoos, and museums. The methods include ethnographic and narrative approaches drawn from multispecies ethnography (Van Dooren et al., 2016), feminist multispecies storytelling, and art-based experimentation. One of the ways the ideas of margins and experimentation are actualized in the project is a pop up research station built on an electric bicycle, which will allow flexible modes of participation across a range of informal (educational) events.

Besides the above outlined participatory knowledge practices, I will also present another outcome of the research: an archive of collectively created stories (including visual, sonic, artistic modes of narratives). The purpose of this developing, internet-based story archive is to offer an accessible and inclusive resource for policy-makers, educational practitioners, and larger audience. It will be a living testimony of this specific moment, while also putting forth another form of participatory knowledge practice based on the worlding potentials of multispecies storytelling.

Author

• Riikka Hohti, University of Oulu
  Presenting Author