Site/Sight/Insight: Becoming a Socioecological Learner Through Collaborative Artmaking Practices

Rousell, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4509-6128, Lasczik, Alexandra, Irwin, Rita L, Ellis, David, Hotko, Katie and Peisker, Jemma (2019) Site/Sight/Insight: Becoming a Socioecological Learner Through Collaborative Artmaking Practices. In: Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning: The Anthropocene, Posthumanism and Commonworlds as Creative Milieus. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163-187. ISBN 978-3030122119

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Abstract

This chapter explores collaborative arts practices as critical and creative vehicles for assembling a figure of the socioecological learner. We focus on developing the sensorial and affective dimensions of learning through aesthetic engagements with place, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of the “larval subject”, “carte”, and “rhizome”. In doing so, we also forge connections with contemporary life sciences that reveal the permeability and plasticity of learning processes through dynamic interactions within developmental eco-systems. These conceptual and empirical resources inform our posthumanist methodological approach to collaborative arts practices, which we describe in terms of a c/a/r/tography. Through the collaborative production of “site/sight-specific” images and poetic texts, we seek to produce a generative and visually critical exposé, which locates the emergence of the socioecological learner within a “biosocial ecology of sensation”. This opens up a field of potentials for sensing, thinking, feeling, and learning through collective aesthetic engagements with more than human worlds.