The aim of this project is to interrogate the self-evidence of approaches to conservation ecology and environmental monitoring by throwing open the very question of what it means to pay attention to all these beings who have been paying attention for so many millennia. Working at the cusp of art, anthropology, and ecology, this research-creation project cultivates a queer, feminist, anticolonial, political ecology of an urban park that reimagines the techniques and practices of ecology beyond the normative, moralizing, economizing discourses that ground conventional approaches. The aim is to experiment with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land. This “ungrid-able ecology” reconfigures the naturalist’s notebook by innovating techniques for tuning into the affectively charged spaces of encounter and the “involutionary momentum” that propels plants, insects, animals, and people to get involved in this ongoing naturalcultural happening.

Protocols for Doing Ecology Otherwise

Techniques of Attunement for a Sensory Ethnography of a Sentient World

Follow these links to explore techniques for tuning in to the beings and doings in worlds you inhabit:

Gestures

Textures

Sonic Ecologies

Smellscapes

For more on these themes see:

Natasha Myers (2018) “How to grow livable worlds: Ten not-so-easy steps,” in The World to Come, edited by Kerry Oliver Smith, Harn Museum of Art, Gainsville, Florida, p. 53-63.

Natasha Myers (2017) ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-natural History of a Black Oak Savannah‘ in Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art, ed. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson, Bloomsbury Press: 73-96.

Natasha Myers (2017) ‘Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000 year-old NaturalCultural Happening‘, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(2): 1-24.

Natasha Myers (2017) ‘From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution,’ History and Anthropology 28 (30): 297-301.

Natasha Myers (2016) ‘Photosynthesis,’ in ‘Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen,’ eds Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website, January 21, 2016.

Natasha Myers (2015) ‘Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field,’ NatureCulture 03: p. 35-66.

Natasha Myers (2014) A Kriya for Cultivating Your Inner Plant, Imaginings Series, Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.

Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers (2012) ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters‘ in differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 23(3): 74-117. Special Issue “Feminist Theory Out of Science” edited by Sophia Roosth and Astrid Schrader.