Dancing with the Dog: Interspecies cadence and urban life

Dillon, Teresa

Abstract

Invited lecture at the Environmental Justice Research Unit, Cardiff Uni, 14th May

In ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene’ (2016), Donna Haraway, proposes that a humanity with a more earthly integrity, “invites the priority of our pulling back and scaling down, of welcoming limitations of our numbers, economies, and habitats for the sake of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life” (p.50). While this statement carries capacities for imagining new ways of living, it equally raises the question what a more earthly integrity and inclusive freedom and quality of life, actually means? For Haraway this revolves around entangled understandings of kin, multispecies justice and feminist leadership. Tsing (2012, 2017) further expands on such knotted kinship by emphasising how our human nature is an interspecies relationship, that emerges in part through what Vygotsky (1980) would consider as the active participation with others in mean making, or what Barad (2007) would refer to as the materialisation of intra-action. Despite such worldly understandings, in the face of increased biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, and human-made and natural disasters such tethered realities are often negated, in favour of more state-centred politics and geo-economic logics. Given the dominance of such framings on the daily ordering of life, the need to crave out spaces for listening, care, attending and attuning to the nuanced understandings of our interspecies relationships, becomes all the more important. This paper presents how contemporary artists are dealing with such relationships. Drawing on the work of Terike Haapoja, Maja Smrekar, Laurie Anderson and others, including that of the author, emphasises is placed on species presence, visibility and privilege, with a focus on urban contexts and settings. Links will be made to how such works and narratives play a vital role in the everyday understanding of human nature as an interspecies relationship.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Start Date: May 14, 2019
• End Date: May 14, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2020
• Series Title: New Materialist Reflections for the Anthropocene
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5634251