Collaborative narratives: participation and perspectives for more-than-human worlds
Ramoutsaki, Helen (2023) Collaborative narratives: participation and perspectives for more-than-human worlds. In: [Presented at Environmental Communication: Science Inspired and Arts Delivered Symposium]. From: Environmental Communication: Science Inspired and Arts Delivered Symposium, 5 May 2023, Cairns, QLD, Australia.
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Abstract
This presentation reflects on the collaborative interweaving of creative arts, humanities and science in projects concerned with complex challenges in more-than-human worlds. These reflections have come from two interrelated aspects of my practice involved in contributions to a collaborative multi-disciplinary project about weedy life and decoloniality in the tropics (Henry et al., 2023). My first contribution was a multimodal poetic work: a creative natural history of Synedrella nodiflora, also known as Cinderella Weed. Drawing on the observations of a poet-natural historian, incorporating poetic and photographic craft with understandings from botany, ecology, regenerative agriculture and environmental philosophy, and in the direct presence of Synedrella herself, the creative natural history is by nature a multispecies and multidisciplinary endeavour. Delivered by my irreverent alter-ego, MC Nannarchy, the Cinderella Weed Rap offers an alternative academic voice. Secondly, a participatory process brought diverse perspectives together in a multi-authored photo-essay, where a collection of written and photographic narratives have been allowed to sit together, retaining their individuality within the field of a common concern. In their decentring of hierarchies of form and human-imposed values, both these modes of collaborative narrative evince the potentials of diverse modes of academic communication in forms aligned to the experience-rich, profuse complexities of tropical ecosystems.