Visiting Speakers - Dr. Peter Kraftl and Dr. Affrica Taylor
Room: 1195B
Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is hosting Dr. Affrica Taylor from the Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics at the University of Canberra, Australia and Dr. Peter Kraftl from the Dept. Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK from January 29 - February 5, 2020.
In addition to their participation in the "Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods: An Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Climate Pedagogies" symposium Jan 29 - Feb 2, Drs. Taylor and Kraftl will also deliver a public presentation on Monday, February 3, 2020 from 1:00 - 2:30 pm in FEB 1195B. All welcome! Coffee and cookies will be served - please RSVP to jheidenh@uwo.ca by Thursday, January 30 if you would like to attend.
Dr. Affrica Taylor (Common Worlds Research Collective) "Common worlding methods: A collective dialogic approach"
In this time of planetary scale and anthropogenic-triggered ecological systems collapse, common worlding research is research that actively engages with the world around us – materially, conceptually and affectively. It seeks worldly ways of collective (ecological) thinking, acting, and learning that move us beyond exclusively human concerns and conversations.
Affrica will outine the collective dialogic methods she uses in her common worlding research and explain the relational grounds of these dialogues. She’ll acknowledge the key influences on, collaborators with and inspiration for her particular set of collective dialogues - including Arrernte and Luritja country and elders in Central Australia, a selection of feminist environmental scholars, and the mountain bushlands, rivers, rocks and wildlife with whom she lives in south eastern Australia.
She will also offer an example of collective dialogical writing, that emerged from a common worlds climate action pedagogies field trip to Alberta last April. Presented as a series of ‘river dialogues’, this writing provides accounts from a journey along the Athabasca River corridor from Jasper in the Rocky Mountains north west to Fort Murray and the Athabasca tarsands oil mining complex.
Dr. Peter Kraftl "Plastic Childhoods: Starting with Plastics"
This paper will discuss a project that seeks to instigate a critical analysis of 'plastic childhoods'. It will cut through manifold concerns about the state of contemporary Western childhoods to examine the many ways in which children's lives are entangled with the plastics circulating through social, ecological, hydrological and technological systems. It will explore findings from experimental, interdisciplinary approaches to plastic childhoods, which are virtually without precedent in social-scientific childhood studies. These include nanoscientific studies of the circulation of nano- and micro-plastics through children's bodies and environments, and analyses of traces of plastics through different social media. The paper has two aims. Firstly, to discuss how we might develop a more multi-faceted view of how plastics (literally) enter and leave children's lives, their bodies, and their environments, across scales ranging from the very tiny (the nano) to the global. Secondly, to recognise that a focus in plastics is both generative and partial; rather, there is a need to start with plastics as a way of examining how the latter synthesise with and are stuck to bodies human and nonhuman, as they travel together and apart.
