Image above: We have a couple of pairs of pigeons at Hollywood, living and cooing away quite happily amongst the conifers. They love the rowan berries from a few rowan trees we planted on the edge of Hollywood some years ago and have successfully spread rowan and beech seeds from further afield through the forest. Their instinctive actions are a key part of Hollywood’s transformation to a mixes species, more resilient forest.

Over the next few months I’m very lucky to have been accepted at various conferences to share my ongoing artful-forest transformation work.

One conference I’m presenting at is due to my following the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded More-than-Human Participatory project. I recently had news to say that I am presenting at their session of the International Geography Conference in London on Wednesday 27 August.

“One of the foremost proponents of participatory research – action researcher Peter Reason – has argued that the ethical and political imperatives implicit within the co-production paradigm need to be extended to non-humans. Claiming that we need to re-conceive ourselves as embedded within biotic systems, Reason characterises the notion of the more-than-human as an emergent edge within participatory research.”
More-than-Human Participatory Research Group

This is the seminar outline of a series of sessions, of which I’m presenting:  ‘Co-production of knowledge with non-humans’:

This series of sessions will explore how the co-production of knowledge within (and between) communities is being expanded beyond narrowly human notions of community to take into account the ‘voices’, needs and agencies of non-humans. We seek to explore how co-production has been done (historical examples), is being done, and can be done (imagined futures), with panoplies of non-humans which range through animals, plants, technologies and materials within space-time in both topological and topographical formations. We feel that expanding the processes of knowledge creation through co-production is a necessary step in efforts to address the toxic nature/culture divide and in developing materialist techno-ecologicalisation of politics and ethics (Haraway, Latour, Bennett, Barad etc.). We need deeper engagements with the ecological (taken in its broadest sense), materialised processes which conjure communities into being, sustain them, set them together, apart, in conflict, and bring them down; and in how they might be reformed into more just configurations. We seek contributions which: report upon work that has sought to co-produce knowledge with non-humans; speculate (plan) conceptually and methodologically on how co-productions with non-humans of differing stripe might be done; stage dialogues between specialists in co-production and those specialising in the more-than-human (broadly conceived).

This is my submitted outline for my presentation for the  3rd session of this seminar titled “Co-producing place with non-humans”