One of the characteristics of arts-based environmental education is that it encourages participants to be receptive to nature in new and uncommon ways. The participant is encouraged to immerse him or herself in nature, to seek a “deep identification.” In my paper I explore if there could be cases where such immersion may reach – or even go beyond – a point of no return. A point, where the “intertwining” with nature causes the subject to sever the “life lines” to the world which would enable him or her to maintain the psychological, cultural and spiritual integrity of the ego. The dissolving of the ego’s boundaries through artistic practice can be seen as having certain shamanistic qualities, specifically in cases when this transgression involves efforts to connect with other animal species. Such undertakings may constitute – at least in the perception of the shaman-artist – a form of “going native,” becoming “one” with the non-human Others.As relevant cases I discuss the “trespassing” from the world of culture into the world of nature by Joseph Beuys in his famous studio encounter with a coyote and Timothy Treadwell entering the life-world of the grizzly bears in Alaska, for which he ultimately paid the price of death (the tragic story was documented in Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man”).I analyze these phenomena along the distinction between Apollonian versus Dionysian sensibility in cultural activity as articulated by Nietzsche. Finally I discuss some pedagogical implications for teachers and facilitators who encourage an attitude of radical amazement and vulnerability in arts-based environmental education.
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We, Rajni and Laura, have been writing letters to each other for several years including in the context of collaboration on a large research project concerned with interspecies relations and the notion of "radical equality". For Listening across difference: letters of love/questions of radical equality we arranged a series of writing sessions where we wrote letters to each other in relation to the words 'radical', 'equality' and 'radical equality'. We wrote at the same time, but different places. We did not exchange or read each other's letters until the end. The letter-writing has enabled us to reflect on aspects of our evolving (work/life) processes which in many ways feel like the core of the "work" we have one together, but that often go unnoticed by listeners and readers within the more presentational aspects of the projects. In particular, the ways in which power structures are negotiated with care and awareness between us. The choice of the form of an exchange of letters was partly inspired by Royona Mitra and Broderick D.V. Chow's The UCLA Letters: On Dismantling Whiteness in the Academy (2019). Like them, we are interested in how the process of letter writing enables a kind of dance of thinking between the conceptual and the personal. But we listen across difference differently. As two scholars of colour, Mitra and Chow's letters present their shared and diverging perspectives on how to address the Whiteness of the UK academy. As a non-binary artist of colour and as a white cis-woman researcher, our letters try to feel their way into an intimate and honest dialogue across difference.
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Ascertaining the contribution of research is complex; this is not a conclusion but a starting point for the preliminary thoughts in this inaugural lecture. The guiding question is: where does this complexity lie? The dominant answer that has taken root in many practices flattens this complexity into a line. As a handle, or a rule of thumb. The concept of continuous effects serves as a crowbar to break open this one-dimensionality, not least to do more justice to practice-based research at universities of applied sciences. This allows for a different way of looking at how practice-based research contributes to change: from continuous effects ‘stretching each moment to the fullest’ and indicators of the effects of direct interactions, to multiple action perspectives beyond merely generating new knowledge to bring about change.
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MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization. Entering the 10th year of the global financial crisis, it still remains a difficult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. The MoneyLab network questions persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless, automated decision making and (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of cybercurrencies and blockchained solutionism.We consider experiments with digital coops, internet-based payment and network-based revenue models as spaces of political imagination, with an equally important aesthetic program. In this second MoneyLab Reader the network delves into topics like the financialization of art; love as a binary proposition on the blockchain; the crowdfunding of livelihood; the cashless society; financial surveillance of the poor; universal basic income as the real McCoy or a real sham; the cooperative answer to Airbnb and Uber; the history of your financial dashboard; and, Hollywood’s narration of the financial crisis. Fintech rushes through our veins, causing a whirlwind of critical concepts, ideas and imaginaries. Welcome to the eye of the storm.
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In this report we describe the setup and results of a study in which primary school pupils from the Netherlands undertook a photovoice assignment. They photographed vegetables they liked and disliked and used these photographs to make postcards, which they sent – with text – to pupils from a primary school in Benin. The pupils in Benin took part in a similar photovoice exercise and also created postcards, which they then used to respond to the card they received. This way, the pupils from the two countries communicated with each other about the vegetables they eat, like, and dislike.
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In 'Ecodemocracy in the Wild: If existing democracies were to operationalize ecocentrism and animal ethics in policy-making, what would rewilding look like?' Helen Kopnina, Simon Leadbeater, Paul Cryer, Anja Heister, and Tamara Lewis present a democratic approach to considering the interests of entities and the correlation of rights of nature within it. According to the authors , ecodemocracy's overarching potential is to establish the baseline principles that dethrone single species domination and elevate multiple living beings as stakeholders in all decision-making. They provide insights on how ecodemocracy could become manifest and what it takes to achieve mult-species justice. A unique contribution in this chapter is the notion of ecodemocracy in rewilding , exemplified bij the controversial Dutch rewilding experiment in Oostvaardersplassen. The authors discuss the complexities of decision-making in the interest of different species and the challenges that arise when implementing such politics.
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Infosheet. Within the context of animal burrows surveys that took place in the test season 2021-2022 in the living lab Hedwige-Prosperpolder, an experimental setup with smoke bombs was developed to verify whether detected burrows by small rodents are interconnected in the subsurface. By injecting colored smoke in one of the detected burrows the team could observe if the smoke would exit the ground from other burrows in the proximity gaining insight into the extent of subsurface connections of burrows. The detection of several exit points is a sign that there is a system of tunnels in the levee that leads to a den. This is most likely a weak spot on the levee that requires attention by the levee managers. The test was repeated 5 times using different variants in its assembly and also testing burrows by larger animals. This helped to gradually improve the setup and make it more practical for use by levee inspectors.
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