Listening, Seeding, and Letting Go: Immersive Environmental Experiences Along Birrarung Marr

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Conceptual and Imaginative Expansions for Environmental Justice (Table 7)

Abstract

This paper considers experiences of immersion as children map the multi-layered sonic ecology of Birrarung Marr, a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We explore how speculative practices of immersion shaped the mapping of soundscapes of Birrarung Marr, and the ceremonial burial of these sonic cartographies for future listeners. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of immersion in mutually respectful conversation, we follow how immersion ‘drifts’ across porous thresholds of sensing, thinking, making, and knowing in situated environmental education contexts. In doing so, the paper stresses the importance of immersive experience in cultivating liveable environmental futures, and responds to the need for new understandings of immersion that take more-than-human ecologies of experience into account.

Authors

• David Rousell, RMIT University
  Presenting Author

• Andreia Penaloza-Caicedo, RMIT University
  Non-Presenting Author