Exploring and mapping time-related dimensions of more-than-human actors around water: what is "time" for humans and non-humans? What does our anthropocentric understanding of time (clock and calendar time) mean for our relations to our more-than-human environment? How could we expand our thinking about time through a non-human lens?
Virtual Place
Date
Partners
Service Design Lab at Aalborg University
As a part of UNIC seed funding that is coordinated by Koc University Istanbul (Assoc. Prof. Aykut Coskun, PhD student Berre Su Yanlıç) and with Oulu University (Postdoc Maria Saari) and Malmö University as partners, we are exploring how a knowledge sharing platform for more-than-human research can be developed. The concept more-than-human has got increased attention as a focus for researchers in diverse disciplines in recent years. Often its used to challenge the strong anthropocentric norm that are dominant in most of our societies, and it rather bring attention to humans as closely entangled with other living (and non-living) entities within complex eco-systems.
On the 26th of February it was Malmö University’s turn to organize a workshop to test a format for how UNIC scholars and other actors could come together to learn and exchange knowledge about more-than-human research. The PhD student Anna Schröder, the guest PhD student Hadas Zohar (Aalborg University), and professor Per-Anders Hillgren prepared a hybrid gathering that brought together scholars from various UNIC universities working with a more-than-human lens. In the workshop, twelve participants explored and mapped time-related dimensions of more-than-human actors around water. The basic idea was to explore the questions: What is time for humans and non-humans? What does our anthropocentric understanding of time (clock and calendar time) mean for our relations to our more-than-human environment? How could we expand our thinking about time through a non-human lens?
As the frame for this workshop the participants were requested to do a short exercise where they went out to a water environment to observe and learn about more-than-human actors’ temporalities. To support this, they received a digital workbook with instructions, questions and prompts to visualize these temporalities. One local group in Malmö brought their attention to the inner harbour next to the university campus, while remote participants from Oulu and Koc did similar exercises in their local water system. During the afternoon all participants shared their reflections of the exercise. One interesting reflection that many shared was that they got surprised by how much they learned by directing their attention towards these actors and by inquiring into their life cycles and temporalities. It also became clear that there is much more we need to learn about the complex temporalities and how to represent them visually. Overall, the approach seemed like a valuable way for more-than-human researchers without background in the natural sciences to engage themselves and their students in more-than-human entanglements.
The workshop was a collaboration between UNIC- Center for City Futures (Malmö, Koc and Oulu), Collaborative Future-Making, Malmö University, and the Service Design Lab at Aalborg University.
The results were in line with the overarching value of more-than-human research which is to create better awareness about and care for our surrounding ecosystems. The particular focus in this workshop on water and the ocean are also highly relevant for all of us because healthy water systems are such a central component for our ecosystem and wellbeing. The local site chosen for the exercise in Malmö, the inner harbour outside of the university campus, is the centre for the City of Malmö’s engagement with the sea, and significant efforts are being made there to recreate the marine life by reducing the depth from 11 to 4 meters and making space for the natural ecosystem to move back into the basin. Anna Schröder works in connection to these processes and through her role in the project Bauhaus of the Seas Sails she also collaborates with the “Marint Kunskapscenter i Malmö” (Marine Educational Center), an NGO financed by the City of Malmö. We hope and expect that the further learnings from these processes also will be shared within UNIC:s evolving network of more-than-human researchers.
UNIC Seed Fund
