Alterstories from the soil – exploring ecological un/belongings

A one day hybrid symposium 15^th June 2022, 9.00-6.30pm at the University of Warwick - REGISTRATION IS FREE : LINKLink opens in a new window 

Soils have stories to tell about pasts, presents and futures in the making. The environmental crisis affecting soils today has led to a wave of appreciation of their materiality as living worlds and to calls to rethink human-soil relations as an ecological community of care. Yet soils also entail a material memory of troubled associations with un/belonging. Stories about human-soil attachments can evoke deep care for places, but also historical and current exploitation, exclusion, and dispossession from land and community. Encouraging re-imaginations of human-soil relations as ecological belongings, this gathering seeks to bring together the cares of un/belonging and ecological thinking through alterstories that may nurture alternative conceptions of more than human justice.

Confirmed speakers: Åsa Sonjasdotter, Lesley Green, Patricia Noxolo, Nirmal Puwar, Ros Gray, RL Martens, Adele Reed, Greg Muldoon

The one day symposium will be followed by a public talk by Malcom Ferdinand, author of Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, (Polity, 2022) followed by a response by Shela Sheikh

This symposium is organised by Maria Puig de la BellacasaLink opens in a new window and Giulia ChampionLink opens in a new window as part of the project Ecological Belongings: transforming soil cultures with science, art and activismLink opens in a new window funded with an AHRC Leadership Fellowship. It is hosted by CIM (Centre for Interdisciplinary MethodologiesLink opens in a new window, The University of Warwick) and organised in collaboration with the Warwick Environmental Humanities NetworkLink opens in a new window and the and the Warwick Environmental Systems Interdisciplinary CentreLink opens in a new window

REGISTRATION IS FREE BUT REQUIRED FOR PARTICIPATION - IN PERSON AND REMOTE: FOLLOW THIS LINKLink opens in a new window TO THE REGISTRATION PAGE

*A few TRAVEL BURSARIES are available for precarious or unfunded researchers willing to attend in person: please email directly maria.puig-de-la-bellacasa@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window *

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME (in progress): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/research/research-projects/ecological-belongings/symposium-programme/Link opens in a new window

School of Creative Arts Performances and Visual Cultures summer term research seminar. - Dr Emma Cox (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Interceptive Aesthetics: Performing #SolidarityAndResistance at Sea

In January 2022, approximately 70 forced migrants who had taken precarious refuge on Shell’s Miskar oil platform, situated off the coast of Tunisia and within a European search and rescue (SAR) zone, were handed to Tunisian authorities and returned. As one more iteration of the EU’s biopolitical regime of Mediterranean interdiction and quasi-legalised boat turn-back, the incident was normative, but on this occasion a subsidiary group of people who had been drifting in waters near the oil rig were rescued by the MV Louise Michel, owned by British street artist Banksy. The boat features a spray-paint motif and the word RESCUE in lurid pink, along with a repurposed image of Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’. The Louise Michel’s performative, publicised actions represent an explicit aestheticisation of rescue in a region where migrant trauma is already a mediatised spectacle. The Louise Michel’s first operation in 2020 attracted wide media coverage, but it had been held at port by authorities until 2022. The vessel is part of a European network of non-state rescue boats; despite the criminalisation of their work, these operations have increased substantially in recent years, entering a space of diminished EU response. Deploying the hashtags #SolidarityAndResistance and #AllBlackLivesMatter, NGO operations situate maritime rescue as affiliative, direct-action resistance to state power, contextualised by global anti-racism. This paper considers what kind of solidarity is enacted by NGOs like the Louise Michel and reflects on ways in which the interceptive aesthetics of their work might revise ideas about refugee-responsive performance as intervention.

Biographical Note

Emma Cox is Reader and Head of Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship (2015), Theatre & Migration (2014), and editor of the play collection Staging Asylum (2013). Cox’s writing has been published in journals such as Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (2020).

All attendees are welcome at a drinks reception following the lecture.

Benjamin Dalton (Birmingham)

Relaxing with Catherine Malabou: Approaches to letting go in philosophy and neuroscience

This paper will explore themes of relaxation, letting be, and letting go in the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Writing at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and other diverse disciplines, the concept at the core of Malabou’s work is that of plasticity: the ways in which the body and brain are ‘plastic’, and thus radically mutable and transformable. Malabou’s work is concerned with the question of how we might activate or embrace this plasticity for socio-political change and emancipation. One of responses to this ‘how’, I will argue, is to do precisely with modes of relaxation, letting be, and letting go that are more or less latent in Malabou’s elaboration of plasticity. These modes of relaxation and release are not to be confused with ideas of rest, R&R, stress-relief, wellness, etc.; rather, I argue, they invoke or induce a radical state of self-abandonment or self-shattering (of the body, brain, spirit) at play in Malabou’s accounts of profound transformation and metamorphosis. In his book La Soltura del cuerpo (2018), Cristóbal Durán analyses what he refers to as ‘la soltura’ in Malabou’s account of the plastic body and brain, which might translate from the Spanish as ‘ease’, ‘release’, ‘setting free’, but also ‘skill’. Durán here draws upon instances where Malabou describes plasticity through a lexis of release or letting go. Meanwhile, Malabou herself writes a preface to Anne Dufourmantelle’s Puissance de la douceur (2013), in which she praises the radical potentiality of Durfourmantelle’s concept of douceur, softness or gentleness. This gentleness, Malabou stresses, is not the kind of relaxation we find in neo-liberal approaches to meditation, mindfulness, yoga, etc., but an altogether more fundamental and radical instance of letting go. Bringing together these ideas from Malabou, Durán, and Dufourmantelle, I want to extend these theorisations of relaxation across three other interlocutors: the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (Cerveau et Méditation, 2017), who brings philosophy, meditation, and neuroscience together; the architects and philosophers Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who design built environments which relax and transform the body; and experimentations with psychedelics in the pursuit of neural and socio-political transformation in the movement known as ‘acid communism’. I ask: what technologies and practices (medical, architectural, spiritual, etc.) might induce the kinds of relaxation present in Malabou’s philosophy? What practical implications and potentials would these states have for the body and mind? And what forms of socio-political transformation might these states of relaxation bring about?

Benjamin's paper will be followed by a Response from Oliver Davis, Professor of French Studies, Warwick.

To join the seminar on Teams click here.