{"id":5309,"date":"2013-12-19T09:08:13","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T09:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=5309"},"modified":"2013-12-19T09:08:13","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T09:08:13","slug":"co-production-of-knowledge-with-plants-animals-materialities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2013\/12\/19\/co-production-of-knowledge-with-plants-animals-materialities\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-production of knowledge with plants, animals, materialities ..."},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you tired of life? \u00a0Are you jaded by its materialist urgings? \u00a0 Do you feel yourself helpless in a neo-liberal embrace? \u00a0Have you lost sight of what it is to be inter-human? \u00a0Do you no longer know who you really are and what you're for? \u00a0 Do you feel as if your spiralling into that existential black hole of inconsequence? \u00a0If so, this could be the conference for you.<\/p>\n

The blurb says:<\/p>\n

The co-production of research with(in) communities is a welcome effort to democratize, de-centre and reenergize knowledge production (Durose et al<\/em> ).\u00a0 Inspired by a variety of feminist epistemologies, as well as emancipatory movements from South America and Africa (e.g. Freire), the central components of the co-production agenda have been the desire to support the inclusion of marginalised voices in the research process, to make research accountable to those it affects, and, in the process, to transform the practices of research and knowledge production. However co-production often remains in the human\/social realm consisting of partnerships, collaborations, conflict management, development plans, etc. between individual and collective social agencies. We are concerned that co-produced research which stays within the (narrowly prescribed) social (human)\u00a0 realm becomes \u2018part of the problem\u2019 rather than \u2018part of the solution\u2019 in terms of\u00a0 long term flourishing of diverse life.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the foremost proponents of participatory research - Peter Reason \u2013 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. Durose et al<\/em> have also drawn attention to how long-standing epistemological debates about the nature of knowledge and expertise lie at the heart of debate about the impact of co-producing research.<\/span><\/p>\n

Engagement with a whole range of work that identifies human exceptionalism as a fundamental impediment to knowledge, has been recognized as key to effectively addressing socio-ecological challenges. The (neglected)\u00a0 interdependencies between the social and the ecological are writ large in the current era of \u2018ecocide\u2019,\u00a0and realigning them from toxic to therapeutic forms is essential.\u00a0However, transformative dialogues between co-production practitioners and those working on the more-than-human, which promise so much for both approaches, have yet to take place.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus we are specifically interested to explore how co-produced research can be inclusive of a wider set of actors than just the human. And in how to meet the challenges and opportunities offered by exploring methods and philosophies of co-production and how it might be transformed by the recognition of experiences, desires and knowledges of more-than-human agencies. And, in turn, how more-than-human approaches might learn from the attentiveness to community, voice, participation and methodology which have been developed within the field of co-production.\u00a0 The session draws inspiration from a variety of recent projects and writings which have sought to bring non-humans of one kind or another (plants, animals, technologies, and wider materialised processes) into knowledge co-production. These have variously engaged with ideas of empathy, agency, witnessing, experimental partnering, data sonification, narrative theory, conversation and voice to explore possibilities of co-working with non-humans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Contributions (using tradition or non-tradition formats) might: -<\/span><\/p>\n