Plaiting perspectives: transdisciplinary connection-making

Plaiting Perspectives is a transdisciplinary process for collaborative juxtaposition of Creative Arts, Sciences, Humanities and Indigenous Knowledge perspectives. Using the plaiting model each position maintains its integrity while contributing to the potential for innovative and creative emergent understandings

Collaborative narratives: participation and perspectives for more-than-human worlds

This presentation reflects on the collaborative interweaving of creative arts, humanities and science in projects concerned with complex challenges in more-than-human worlds. These reflections have come from two interrelated aspects of my practice involved in contributions to a collaborative multi-disciplinary project about weedy life and decoloniality in the tropics (Henry et al., 2023). My first contribution was a multimodal poetic work: a creative natural history of Synedrella nodiflora, also known as Cinderella Weed. Drawing on the observations of a poet-natural historian, incorporating poetic and photographic craft with understandings from botany, ecology, regenerative agriculture and environmental philosophy, and in the direct presence of Synedrella herself, the creative natural history is by nature a multispecies and multidisciplinary endeavour. Delivered by my irreverent alter-ego, MC Nannarchy, the Cinderella Weed Rap offers an alternative academic voice. Secondly, a participatory process brought diverse perspectives together in a multi-authored photo-essay, where a collection of written and photographic narratives have been allowed to sit together, retaining their individuality within the field of a common concern. In their decentring of hierarchies of form and human-imposed values, both these modes of collaborative narrative evince the potentials of diverse modes of academic communication in forms aligned to the experience-rich, profuse complexities of tropical ecosystems

MC Nannarchy's plastic wrap

As a live poetry-in-performance event, MC Nannarchy's Plastic Wrap uses humour and a narrative based on scientific research to engage community audiences in remediating responses to the issue of marine plastic debris in the Anthropocene

The arachnophobe poet as natural historian: connecting poetic practice with the more-than-human world

As a poetic natural history, this thesis captures poetry, photographs, natural histories, autoethnographic and eco-philosophical reflections in the web between a Giant Golden Orb-weaving Spider, Nephila pilipes, and an arachnophobic performing poet in the Wet Tropics bioregion of Far North Queensland. My creative practice-led research was initiated by the inquiry: How can the experience of living in the Wet Tropics, focusing on human interactions and relationships with and within the natural environment, be interpreted through poetry in live performances which are designed to engage audiences and evoke awareness of place while exploring meaningful connections to the Wet Tropics environment? As a result of this inquiry I have written a collection of poems featuring my lived experience of the Wet Tropics, some of which are incorporated into scripted performances, alternating these feature poems with either a prose narrative monologue or a further series of narrative 'coupling' sonnets. Written in a modular, tessellating format, the scripts have been adapted for performances of varying lengths, environments and audiences, being most at home in intimate venues. With performed poetry synchronised to my photojournalistic images, my creative practice creates a continuity of material presence from poet and place through to a shared making of meaning with audiences. A number of these poems are to date presented only on the page, embedded in the thesis. These focus on the nexus of poet and spiders within the wider systems of backyard and bioregion, including our severe tropical cyclone-bringing weather-world. The fear and revulsion I felt at my first startling sight of the Nephila in my backyard alerted me to the significance of emotion in encounters within the more-than-human world. In returning for another look, camera in hand, fascination was drawn into my emotional mix, prompting the extended inquiry: What meaning do I, as a poet, make of a meeting with a member of another species so different from me? In response, my investigation actuates the dynamics of the role of a poet-natural historian through sustained, repeated, continuing engagement, observing and recording inner and outer phenomena in poems, journals and images, also considering the further question: What does it mean to be both a natural historian and a poet? To describe the material-poetic relationship with the Nephila, in an extension of Plumwood's (2002) concept of the familiar as a free-living wild animal, I define the Familiar as a specific entity, aspect or quality of a habitat or bioregion to which the poet-natural historian has developed a bond. Where there is no sign of reciprocation, this necessitates a poetic act of approach, a movement towards. My writing and performing to the Familiar in the Wet Tropics has taken on the style of poetic profusion, which approximates the environmental experience (Brathwaite, 1984) in my poet-natural historian's perception of the moods and lushness of the bioregion. Elements of this style are discussed, with examples from my work and the work of other poets writing in and of the Wet Tropics. In conceptualising my research activities and processes, I redeploy Smith and Dean's (2009) iterative cyclic web model, following the metaphor of an orb web to show it as a recursive system that inacts fresh content and processes into the creative practice-led inquiry so that it continually enriches, re-frames and re-contextualises. A recursive interplay develops between my physical engagement with the environment in active observation and my theoretical, cognitive engagement through inductive and abductive inferencing. My inferences take the form of both hypotheses and metaphorical models, where I allow the living source of the metaphor to take the lead by providing new mappings and inviting fresh looks at the assumptions of the target domain. Putting into action Elizabeth Sewell's (1971) postlogical thinking mode as a dance between science and poetry, while taking into account the effects of emotion, this thesis becomes a poetic and discursive artefact which evinces the relationships, processes and products of the poet-natural historian creative research mode. As embedded in the more-than-human world, this mode incorporates the extension of a field of conscious awareness into our sensory world through abduction, the poet's use of inner and outer observation, poetic reverie and unitary consciousness within a polycentric, non-hierarchical ethical and artistic view. Lived experience reveals the importance of appreciating the co-presence of earth-others and the inherent materiality of life processes, so that the effects of presence oscillate with the effects of meaning-making (Gumbrecht, 2004, 2006) in a field of relationships which is not only aesthetic but touching into an enlivened style of living that embraces Weber's empirical subjectivity and poetic objectivity (2013). From within the emotional loop between arachno-revulsion and arachno-compulsion, I consider the relationships humans have towards aspects of the other-than-human world that induce fascination and sometimes also fear. My experience highlights how affective bonds can form and feed into the dynamics of physical presence and creative, symbolic meaning. In the territory beyond my new-found fascination for the Nephila pilipes, multiple responses buzz for attention: anthropomorphic nurturing, arachnomorphic identification and a growing curiosity which morphed into intellectual avarice, a collecting of photographic data like a Nephila's food cache hung on a trophy line above the web's hub. Where the processes of environmental writing involve shared lived experience in a human-and-more world, filaments of practice lie tensed between the power of interspecies contact and the threat of disastrous intrusion. When my camera's contact-lens became an impact-lens, I understood that sometimes these threads are best woven into a barrier web which alerts me to where to draw the line. From my deepening relationship to one individual spider, a bond has grown to others of her species in my backyard. As this enhanced feeling of connection extends out more widely to my Shire and the Wet Tropics bioregion, the Nephila pilipes and other entities, aspects and qualities of the bioregion have become my Familiars, so that my evocations of the Wet Tropics environment find meaning in poetic acts of writing and performing to the Familiar

"I'm not greedy but I like a lot": attitudes to consumption in an oversized teacup

Human values and behaviour at both individual and societal levels can influence the success of goals for global sustainable development. This creative practice-embedded presentation addresses self-interested overconsumption in relatively affluent societies, such as Britain, the United States and Australia. Such excessive consumption challenges attempts to achieve balanced, equitable economies and sustainable lives within the more-than-human world. Kate Raworth’s alternative Doughnut Economics model makes explicit the overshoot into environmental degradation and the shortfall in relation to the twelve social priorities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2017). However, Schokkaert’s critique of the model acknowledges that while individuals can act altruistically, we cannot ignore the “self-interested free riders” and the state as “an instrument of the powerful and rich to exploit the poor” (2019, p. 130). The normalisation of exploitative excessive consumption is evident in material culture. The chance find of an oversized vintage teacup made in England, inscribed with the motto, “I’m not greedy but I like a lot”, led me into a creative and historical investigation of how the meme has been applied to corrupt councillors, over-taxing politicians, invading national leaders and to the enjoyment of home comforts in the form of a good cup of tea or cocoa. Taking the teacup and other oversized vessels with their accompanying slogans as materialised metaphors of excess consumption and unequal power relations demonstrates relative advantage, disadvantage and attitudes to the concept of greed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, compared and contrasted with contemporaneous attitudes. My grandmother alter-ego, MC Nannarchy, expresses her findings in her idiosyncratic spoken-word rapping style with a satirical message in her role as the Minister for the Economy and Gastronomy, delivered over her very capacious evening cup of cocoa

Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology

A continuity of Country: enlivenment in a live evocation of place

The term 'Country' can be used to connote a specific environment enmeshing the individual in subjective relationships with place, including other inhabitants. This exegetical essay complements 'Wet: an appetite for the tropics' ('Wet'), a work of live oral-spatial literature that creates a continuity of presence from the author-performer in direct connection with Country to its evocation with audiences in a range of performance contexts, including academic conferences. 'Wet' interprets the experience of living in the Wet Tropics area of Queensland, Australia, through performed poetry, a narrative monologue and embedded photographs. Three intertwined branches of this practice-as-research – the creative work, the creative practice and the performative, practice-led methodology – are explored in alignment with Andreas Weber's concept of 'Enlivenment'. As a creative project concerned with subjectivities of being in relationship, place and environment, 'Wet' resonates with Weber's reconfiguring of an incomplete worldview built on the Enlightenment practices of rational thinking and empirical observation. He extends these practices into a 'bio-poetic' understanding of life-as-meaning and a 'poetic objectivity' which is founded in the 'empirical subjectivity' at the core of life. 'Wet' employs such poetic objectivity to map the protagonist's shifting existential meanings as her empirical subjectivity – her embodied meaning – deepens in relationship to place perceived as landscape, as environment and finally as a 'panscape' in which she is aware of, as Weber puts it, the 'ecological exchange' that 'brings with it reciprocal flows of matter, energy and existential relatedness'(20). As a unique, ephemeral event which plays out in the co-presence of author and audience, each performance of 'Wet' shares these features in addition to the key traits of living organisms that Weber identifies. As performative research, the live presentation of 'Wet' concurs with Weber's vision for the enlivening 'significant liberation' that comes from the constructive conflation of theory and practice (41)