[-empyre-] Introducing Special Guest Joan Haran -- On Cyborgs and Goddesses: the work of Haraway and Starhawk

[joanharan at gmail.com]

Dear -empyre-,

Thanks to Margaretha for inviting me to join this fascinating conversation.
I've really been enjoying the contributions this past week. I've been very
taken by the term 'ruderal' which was new to me and I managed to spread it a
little further yesterday. I'd been invited to run a workshop as part of a
Cardiff University-run event on "Learning from the Grassroots". I attended
the day-long event as a participant and amongst other things heard a really
interesting presentation by a researcher, Chris Maughan, from Coventry
University's Research Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience on
FarmHacks, a peer-to-peer form of agricultural learning and making that has
travelled to the UK from the US, as well as an experiential workshop on
facilitation before my own contribution. 

I spoke a little about my research on the entanglement of SF (science
fiction/speculative fiction/speculative fabulation) and social and
environmental justice before borrowing insights and tools from Walidah
Imarisha's work on Visionary Fiction as well as a workshop on ReStorying the
Future that I attended that was led by Starhawk and Ravyn Stanfield. I also
mentioned Joanna Macy's use of Imaginary Hindsight and I believe that
Starhawk and Ravyn's workshop drew on some of Macy's practices with the
addition of a fair bit of trancework. Anyhoo - I asked my co-participants to
work in pairs or in groups to come up with visionary fictions that imagined
the successful tackling of an issue or a problem that they had identified
together. They only had thirty minutes to work on their fictions but they
were really creative, and the real point of the exercise was for them to
enjoy being creative together. One group had initially named their
protagonist Liberty when I was listening in on their discussions, but when
they fed their story back to the larger group they had changed her name to
Ruderal. I had mentioned to them my enchantment with the idea of the ruderal
when they were discussing rebuilding society following catastrophe so I was
charmed when they renamed their character, and also explained why to the
larger group.


-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> On Behalf Of margaretha
haughwout
Sent: 10 November 2019 07:58
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Introducing Special Guest Joan Haran -- On Cyborgs and
Goddesses: the work of Haraway and Starhawk

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------