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

[joanharan at gmail.com]

WhiteFeather,

Thank you so much for the response. 

I'm struck that you mention being confronted by your own naivete as that
seems to be my repeated experience with my current research project in which
I keep discovering I've asked the wrong questions. In many ways I'm
welcoming that and horrified by the lack of humility I had as a younger
scholar but it's a challenge to negotiate within the logics of a soft money
career.

I'm curious about the politics and the pragmatics of bioremediation.
Bioremediation was one of the fascinating topics covered in the Permaculture
Design Certificate curriculum that is core to Starhawk's Earth Activist
Training - which I participated in as part of my research - and I found the
possibilities that I learnt about marvellous, but I know that if I were to
experiment with my own local patch of soil I would want to avail myself of
officially sanctioned 'scientific' testing to benchmark my experimentation.
And what would the ethics of that be? How/Could I trust the black boxing of
soil testing technologies and what economies might I be implicated in in
doing so? Not to mention the suspension of such concerns in order to
navigate daily life.

Thanks for sharing the Mi'kmaq curator/ethnologist's strong words: your
question about whether slow violence asks specifically for slow recovery was
the one that I thought was worth grappling with - cf adrienne maree on
urgency thinking - and your account of the backfiring of the 'capping' of
the tailings sites does suggest that it is a question that it would be
foolish to avoid. But I guess that slow recovery might seem like neglect to
some of those suffering the effects of the slow violence.

The concept of "two-eyed seeing" that you describe seems to address head on
what seems to be a key challenge / resource and I'm thinking now of my
friend Grace Dillon who has done a lot of work on curating indigenous
futurisms as another strand of this work. 

The Learning from the Grassroots workshop I participated in yesterday was
heartening - in a similar way to my participation in Earth Activist Training
- as it was an opportunity to meet people who are already using or are open
to using 'imaginary hindsight/ foresight, for what Marisa described as the
possibility "to develop / expand a means of re-valuation that can be tied to
beings-with or of the ruderal? that which may not regard accumulation /
ownership, and instead focus on a care of multispecies others?"' There are
lots of unevennesses / frictions in the meetings but it feels like the
staying with the trouble that many social movements and scholars have done
is being taken up in interesting intergenerational encounters.