What could more-than-human mean for Humans?
In 2018 in Stockholm I stood, captivated but disturbed, in front of beautiful photographs of mountainscapes. These photographs had beautiful light, composition, lines and textures, but once I got closer, I realised that the graphically pleasing elements were the result of extensive human intervention through mining activities.
This was an exhibition by the renowned Swedish photographic artist Helene Schmitz, called Thinking like a Mountain at the Waldemarsudde museum, and it left a lasting impact on me, planting in my mind what human agency in and towards natural ecosystems can mean.
In the exhibition book, the museum director Karin Sidén writes: “At first glance, these landscapes may appear pristine and deserted, but signs of human presence and activity are there in every single work, in the form of forest plantations, pipelines for geothermal heating for industry, mining, ruts from tyres and machinery, or artificial lakes and dams.”
This paragraph captures well the challenge and discomfort that post-humanist thinking implies to me as a human sciences researcher. My lifestyle and life experiences position me as a distant spectator towards natural ecosystems. I’m not a trained biologist, meteorologist, geologist, or an engineer in mining, transport or construction. These fields offer more tangible knowledge about the natural world, or what it means to extract value out of it, than what human sciences do.
As a cultural studies researcher I’m invested in understanding the world of social and symbolic meaning-making and my skills feel inadequate when trying to find a useful, productive entry point to discussing how branches of global consumer industries (automobile, construction, fashion, aviation) extract and circulate material and what the effects of this are on biodiversity and global warming. How can my work possibly be useful in this field?
Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, central academic figures in post-humanist thinking in anthropology each call for human scientists to work side by side with biologists and technologists. It’s necessary so that we can more fully understand what problem we are presented with, and productively solve for a dynamic where human desires generate massive-scale material extraction, circulation and emissions, but also the possibility to course correct and regenerate. The learning curve that follows when different backgrounds meet is also described well in the anthropologist Vincent Ialenti’s Deep time reckoning, a study into the construction of the nuclear waste depository ‘Onkalo’ in Finland. It’s not easy and takes effort, but opens up the potential for more-than-human thinking.
In Humans, we suspect that many in our field ask themselves similar questions, and we want to support and advance the role of human scientists’ role in more sustainable futures. Our founding members Liubava Shatokhina and Oskar Korkman have written about the topic earlier in this blog series, and recently we have kicked off a series of events at Puistokatu 4, which dedicates itself to being “a space of science and hope.”
In our next event we discuss how we as practitioners could re-position our thinking through post-humanist theory and frameworks. To dig into this conceptual space, Humans & Noren have invited Joffy Conolly, PhD researcher and lecturer in (Eco)critical sustainability, part of Oulu University ‘Global responsibility to act sustainably’ program to introduce to us post-humanist perspectives and what they could mean for applied professionals. Joffy’s academic background in the UK is Cambridge and Goldsmiths University but he has also worked for ten years as strategy and brand consultant and more than twenty years in the education sector.
Joffy’s talk addresses anthropocentrism in sustainability: ecocritical, multispecies, relational and more-than-human approaches to sustainability narratives, and human-nature discourses. We invite you for a discussion and debate on how we as practitioners can approach the world in a more-than-human way, so that we can move from a spectator position towards more positive agency as humans (re)learn to live within the boundaries of the natural world. To think more like mountains.
Writer: Heli Rantavuo
HUMANS 