Fresh publication: "The Verge" - Article on Meta-Method for Collaborative Sense-Making - Applied to Just Sustainability Arts

Note: There is a launch party on January 22, 2021 for this publication, contact Dr. Marna for the information.

It's a pleasure to have this research paper, co-authored with Rachel Kippen, published by Artizein this month. We explore a creative process for collaborative sense-making using arts based methods, and how this approach helped us each deepen in understanding our own just sustainability arts research projects. Kudos to Editor Barbara Bickel and Guest Editor Darlene St. Georges: 

The Verge: Networks of Intersubjective Responding for Just Sustainability Arts Educational Research

Two sustainability arts scholars describe a method of data interpretation they developed for making sense of complex environmental and sustainability education research data. They “played” images and recorded a conversation in a form of arts-based intersubjective knowing. The card game process was named the Verge because of how the process promises to surface unheard voices and re-center nondominant insights and ways of knowing. It leverages Casey’s glance method with systems networks to complicate sense making in arts-based educational research. The arts scholars intermixed research data from two just sustainability education research case studies: collages from participants of a climate justice social incubator as well as participant art from place-based ecojustice walking pedagogy research. The article engages in intersubjective responding and generated arts-based responses to the process itself. The Verge catalyzed insight in the researchers’ just sustainability arts educational research. They suggest that the Verge could be a useful research method for arts-based educators, particularly sensitive to the ecological and social justice dimensions of data and learning contexts. The researchers found the method helped them gain insight and perspective, sense bias, make subtle connections, sense patterns, decenter domination discourses, and enhance their capacity to engage creatively and critically with social and ecological intelligence in their research process. They posit that the Verge can nurture the unfinished and ongoing work of educational design for just sustainabilities.

Here is a visual and a poem from the synthesis part of the work: 

 

On the Verge

 

Intersubjective Responding Poem, written by Marna Hauk

 

nexus of the broken, crazed and braised curation:

knots and nodes explode us out of broken boxes.

 

verging, the insistence to connect - no, really the break

ing through of the underlying nettlings and mats

 

imbricating vats of vast connecting. the ribbon works of “fractured seeing” ^*

are ley lines re-announcing possibilities, the subversive truth

 

that “what we need / is here. And we pray: not / for new earth

or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye / clear.” ^**

 

tendrilled rupture of our hallucinated isolation

returning us to intricate netting, nesting, nestling.

 

this living world of whorled amanuensis, fractal wholes:

whether in a circle, under shade of rowan and walking onion,

 

or in circles on sand, weaving reclaimed plastic, we touch in

to the greater weavings, through weft of flocks and stones,

 

warp of stories and names, resurrecting bones, across great spans of time,

dedicated to create sanctuary, for the flourishing of future beings.

 

“We seek not rest but transformation.

We are dancing through each other as doorways.

We are ripples crossing and fusing, journeying and returning.” ^***

 

let our walking, shaking, slaying of chains and remains

forge a greater quaking, realign the sublime subterranean snaking

 

until, amplified, returning to the verge of becoming, to ground and body,

we can forever sense earth tendrils and human hands, connecting us to justice.

just us, quivering, in this queer, deep belly invitation to matter, as we embrace

this umbilical, rooted, radical, cloud-weaving, evanescent, essential net-web-braid.

 

          * Jeanine Canty, 2017, from “Seeing Clearly Through Cracked Lenses”

          ** Wendell Berry, 1985, from “The Wild Geese”

          *** Marge Piercy, from “Circling,” Living in the Open, p. 83

 

Recommended Citation

Hauk, Marna, & Kippen, Amanda Rachel. (2020). The Verge: Networks of intersubjective responding for just sustainability arts educational research. Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal, 5(1) , Article 11.  Retrievable from https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/atj/vol5/iss1/11 

Regenerative Design Education: Living Praxis with a Friendly Universe

By Marna Hauk, Jayanna Killingsworth, Julie Malone, Zoe Nelsen, Tamara Wells, Mandisa Amber Wood

This article was selected as a feature article by Kosmos Journal earlier this year and appears in its entirety here: http://www.kosmosjournal.org/reader-essay/regenerative-design-education-living-praxis-with-a-friendly-universe/

We seek not rest but transformation.
We are dancing through each other as doorways.
We are ripples crossing and fusing, journeying and returning
from the core of the apple, the eye of the mandala,
the cave in the heart of the rose,
the circle without boundaries centered on silence.
–Marge Piercy, from “Circling”

We design enfolded in the rich, transdisciplinary rise and texture of the encircling Earth, which is also our body, which is also the uncoiling possibility spaces of thriving. Regenerative design is a set of living systems design approaches that offers a wide-armed embrace of related ecomimetic and systems design practices including sustainability, permaculture, whole systems, biomimetic, and ecological design. Participants in a graduate course at Prescott College describe some of the key strengths of designing, beyond sustainability, for regeneration. These groundswelling approaches can inspire living buildings and regenerative architecture, and guide ecosocial planning and design at multiple scales for social justice integration and biocultural thriving.

Regenerative Systems Design Lens: Benevolent, Creative, Friendly Universe

The first principle of social permaculture is that the universe is inherently benevolent and creative (Aal & Adair, 2008). In our graduate course we held universal friendliness as a key design principle. We co-authored this collaborative inquiry with the idea of benevolent, creative universe as a design lens for the three practices of regenerative systems design we explore.

Creative Flow in Regenerative Design

Active engagement in creative flow requires an intuitive, reflective, and expansive appreciation for the energetic systems and socially constructed realities design both promotes and challenges. The creative cycle is an intuitive process that requires aesthetical feedback and understanding while letting go, exploring the unknown areas of inner and outer worlds. The ability to replicate, through various forms of art, the intricate and seemingly eccentric ways of nature demands attention to the source.
The exploration of one’s personal creative flow offers opportunities for considering intentional interactions that are rooted in a desire to create and reflect universal kindness, a source of infinite patterns, rhythms, tones, and pulsating energies, all fractalized harmoniously (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Original Artwork by J. Killingsworth (2016)

Relationships also ask for a quality of presence and commitment, advocacy and refinement. We let go into the unknown while maintaining trust in our universal interconnectedness. Futurists such as Soleri and Callebaut can contribute to regenerative design through art, architecture, urban planning, biomimicry, and ecology by creating living systems for sustainable actions.
Regenerative Design Prompt 1: Connect it. Visualize and design to strengthen the hidden or potential flows of connection, kinship, relationship, gratitude, and synergy.

Honoring Feedback

Honoring feedback includes activating and opening to the reverberance of the cosmos in and through design colleagues, inspired by universal friendliness. Feedback is present in all aspects of experience. From the naturally occurring processes around us to the music we choose and the interactions we have with others. The systems within our bodies continually provide subtle feedback to sustain life. When such processes fail, we struggle to survive; when we learn to turn this wisdom inside out, we thrive.
Honoring feedback requires self-knowledge and reflection as well as a willingness to listen with empathetic openness to the learning needs of others. Feedback allows for ecosocial systems corrections, reduction of frictions, and the nourishment of brave and creative collaboration. Reverberance is a quality of feedback that happens concurrently at multiple scales and in amplifying emergence. Designs honoring our feelings saturated in contexts of biocultural depth, meaning, and embedment catalyze the regeneration of Earth within, which we might think of as Earth congruence, Earth empathy, or Earth reverberance.
Regenerative Design Prompt 2: Cycle it. Close three loops to allow your design to speak with itself. Generate positive feedback.

Embodied Practice

Embodied practice opens the flows of feedback through the physical, emotional, and relational experience of interacting with learning, meaning-making, and active participation in the adaptive co-creation of reality with all members of a given community, including the more-than-human world. This practice reconciles the often privileged rational stream of perception and decision-making with many other flows of available information. Each practitioner becomes a network of integrated perceptions, responses, and ideas in and of themselves, within a greater network of individuals participating in cooperative community creativity.
Regenerative Design Prompt 3: Thrive it. Embed yourself within the Earthly matrix, and within the design process and design.

Conclusion

Regenerative design views the generation of these vibrant, bioculturally responsive meshes as vital and congruent in both process and form. The designs and designer-context-Gaian mesh-bodies become a portalway of multispecies collaborative embodiment and co-presence.
Regenerative designs can encourage the interconnection between people and the dynamic forces of nature through regenerative curriculum, art, architecture, agriculture, rituals, and community engagement. Through universal friendliness, regenerative design holds the potential to decentralize inequities in wealth and power and ensure Earthly thriving. 

Call for Proposals - Women in Sustainability Handbook

This call for proposals just out from Marna Hauk, Ph.D. and Denise Mitten, Ph.D.

 

Women in Sustainability are like a stellar nursery, such as the Carina Nebula. Within the emergent processes of the living universe and the generosity of the planetary unfolding, women in sustainability are interweaving ecology, equity, culture, and economics into deep, ancient, innovative, and generative forms and processes for planetary liberation. We are molten, pushing out the borders and bounds of the fields of sustainability in relational connectivity and inclusion. We are pragmatic, grounded, and embodying action. 

We seek an admixture of insight, research, clarity, story-telling, art, and inspiration from women in the fields, practice, or transdiscipline of sustainability. We want to learn from eco-artist mavericks, women in sustainable science, women in collective endeavor; current day success stories; intersectional sustainabilities and sustainable solidarities; ecofeminist, matrixial, and material feminist sustainabilities; journeys into ancient, generative mother-cultures; group-authored visionaries breathing into the labor pains of the current era; love notes to the future. Articles, poems and brief writings, and a “recipes of sustainability” section including self-sustaining as well as mothering sustainable cultures. 

Send your 1-3 page chapter proposal with brief bio and CV by February 1, 2015
Email your chapter proposals or drafts to womeninsustainability at gmail -dot- com by May 1, 2015
This call is also available at: http://www.eartheregenerative.org/wish/

New Edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education - And an Article on Earth Regeneration

The 2011 edition of the Journal of Sustainability Education came out this week. It features many interesting case studies, interviews, and peer-reviewed journal articles, including:

• An interview with Stephen Sterling, who wrote possibly the best handbook on Sustainability Education (interview by Terril Shorb).

• An academic article about Pedalogy and Pedagogy - Living Soil and Sustainability Education: "We introduce an ecologically grounded metaphoric language rooted in living soil as an alternative regenerative framework for linking sustainability pedagogy with pedology (the study of soil). Five principles that guide this relationship are presented: valuing biocultural diversity, sensitizing our senses, recognizing place, cultivating interconnection, and embracing practical experience. Nurtured within an environment of curiosity, wonder, and questioning, and set to the rhythm and scale of localized ecologies, soil serves as an embodiment of life right beneath our feet rather than the reach of distant stars. In learning gardens, living soil and pedagogy surface in dynamic ways to create an ecological landscape of sustainability education." (by Professors Dilafruz Williams and Jonathan Brown, Portland State)

• An article on complexity and sustainability education featuring four natural patterns: composting soil, spring bud burst, chrysalis metamorphosis, and hurricanes, as models for increasing depth, collaboration, diversity, and creativity in learning. These are tied to regenerative earth education (by Marna Hauk of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies).
  

Journal for Sustainability Education Launches

Prescott College's premiere edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education launched today. Includes great pieces :

• Dennis Martinez on The Value of Indigenous Ways of Knowing to Western Science and Environmental Sustainability
• Rick Medrick's Review of Andres Edwards’ Thriving Beyond Sustainability
• Jordana DeZeeuw Spencer's An Evolving Definition of Sustainability
• Pramod Parajuli's auto-ethnography "At Home in Prescott: Confluence of Streams in my Journey as an Interdisciplinary Sustainability Educator"

and a trove of other gems including examples of sustainability curricula, approaches, and resources.