This paper introduces the Feral Map, an open online map that brings together different creative practices questioning the dominant extractive, technocentric rendering and legitimising of particular algorithmic futures. Building on its initial development drawn upon open urban tree data, it invites people to explore and engage with their surroundings in creative, unfamiliar ways and share their experiences in the form of stories, using different kinds of media, sensory impressions, and personal expressions. These stories can be offered to existing places and local “creatures” (such as animals, ambiences, and glitches) or become new creatures on their own, emphasising mattering and entanglements: that change is the only constant in life. Through this, the map obscures the currently available–mostly quantitative–data about a place, and can help to raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape the place and its future. The Feral Map has been evolving to include such stories and creatures–or messy data–from different creative, practice-based research projects. Our paper presents the theoretical framing of the Feral Map and its design, how it has been transforming along with the involved projects, as well as our learnings from the process and possible future directions.
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The Feral Drifting with Lonja Wetlands workshop involved a 4-day feral, performative investigation of multispecies relations and spatio-temporalities of care that shape the flow of life and death in Lonjsko Polje (or Lonja Wetlands), the largest protected wetlands in Croatia. Together with 19 workshop participants, we experimented with feral ways of sensemaking that invite open-ended, multisensory, and spontaneous encounters unfolding beyond the bounds of human control.Inspired by the movements and rhythms of local, other-than-human creatures, such as storks, mosquitoes, storms, and the river Sava, as well as the artistic strategies of dérive (including their flaws), we drifted with the local ecologies and invited pathways towards care-full co-habitation. To navigate through these space-times, we experimented with various performative and speculative sense-making practices including walking, listening, storytelling and forming relations.This feral investigation resulted in co-creative outcomes – or fragments – in diverse forms, such as multispecies rituals, synesthetic maps, wayfinding games, and memory seed banks that were documented as short videos and later turned into the Feral Fragments of Lonjsko Polje film. Here, we share the key processes of our collective workshop and reflect on them in relation to the notion of feral data.
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This article explores how concern about animal welfare and animal rights relates to ecological citizenship by discussing student assignments written about the Dutch Party for Animals or PvdD. ‘Animal welfare’, ‘animal rights’, and ‘ecological citizenship’ perspectives offer insights into strategic choices of eco-representatives and animal rights/welfare advocates as well as educators. The assignments balance animal issues with socio-economic ones, explore the relationship between sustainability and ethics, and attribute responsibility for unsustainable or unethical practices. Analysis of student assignments reveals nuanced positions on the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism continuum, showing students’ ability to critically rethink their place within larger environmental systems. Some students demonstrated compassion for nonhumans, indicating that biophilia is evenly distributed among different groups of students. This article finds that fostering pro-environmentalism and animal welfare or rights requires the deepening of the debate contesting but also connecting key issues in sustainability and ethics. This analysis can be valuable for political parties representing nonhumans, or for education practitioners in getting students to think about the challenges in human-environment relationships and for advancing support for ecodemocracy. https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol8/iss1/10/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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