Being Coral in the Great Dissolution: Fostering Embodied Empathy Across Symbiotic Worlds

• In Event: The Body as Environmental Sensor - I

Abstract

Coral are multispecies organisms, composed of entangled animal, vegetable, mineral, and microbial communities. Coral do not have "bodies" in the typical sense, and thus their sensory capacities are also atypical and remarkable. Marine scientists are increasingly looking to coral as bell weathers of planetary change as coral reefs bleach and die in the face of rising ocean temperatures and acidifying seas. But what changes are coral beings actually sensing? And what can human bodies learn from coral sensation? Is it possible to feel structural exploitation and inequality, as I argue corals do, and could such embodied empathy help us to think differently about planetary change, responsibility, being, and justice? This talk explores the multiplicities and relationalities of human bodies and coral bodies in order to derive a sort of "common sense" empathy about the highly unequal material realities of planetary pollution. We will experiment with sensations, attempting to apprehend acidity and temperature in ways that might make us more capable of empathizing with other organisms, other people, and other forms of entangled symbiotic being so that we might be more capable of comprehending all that we are losing and of reimagining the possibility of response. This focused look at coral being extends existing STS arguments that move our conceptualizations of life beyond the species and the individual organism or body to the worlds of symbionts and holobionts in the hope of enhancing the decolonial capacities of STS through emergent forms of recognition and empathy.

Author

• Amelia Moore, University of Rhode Island/Marine Affairs