Arts of Scholaring on a Damaged Planet (2024)

Last November 12 of 2024 several professors, students, activists and artists stemming from diverse geographies and fields gathered  at Solidaritetshuset (in Södermalm, Stockholm), a living historical house that concentrates much of the multicultural and popular struggles within Stockholm's diverse peoples. We were aiming to share our concerns regarding the roles of academia in the current historical epoch – the Anthropocene – and to co-create some material artifacts which could help us move forward towards the horizons we are demanded to achieve as part of our wider struggles.

Lots of voices in history have claimed that the same operations lead to the same solutions. What is the extent to which we should aim to change our operations one week after the re-election of Donald Trump under an international securitization process, two weeks after the climate disaster on València (Spain) as part of a worsening climate change and a negationist unprepared administration, one year after the intensification of the genocide and apartheid regime that Israel authorities impose on Gaza’s population amid the tension scalation in the region and foreign complicities, five years after the Sars-Cov-2 outbreak due to a further global deforestation that weakens our ecological defenses and deepens social inequalities, five centuries after colonization and its ongoing world-ending trajectory for billions of humans and more-than-humans for cannibal-capitalism’s sake?

These are legible questions in every territory and every aspect of social life. Academia is one of those urgent sites where we should address the operations and effects of such a traditionally neoliberal, upper-class, male, cisheteronomative, White, anthropocentric institution and fight to enact other commoning worlds more adequate with the conditions of the (remaining) web of Life. That is why the Centre for Anthropocene History and the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH launched the workshop ‘Arts of Scholaring on a Damaged Planet’ on November 12, drawing on those fruitful resistances evoked in, among other references, the co-edited volume by Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan and Heather Swanson, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017) –which digs in the histories of multispecies livability within the traces of extinction.

Walking such a compromise requires not only to address uncomfortable discussions, but also to engage with different body practices and formats. For that reason, this workshop was oriented to caring for our networks in an – attempted – participatory and inclusive atmosphere, as well as to the materialization of short-tales. The discussions, the references cited and the short-tales are presented below. Remember to read these materials from their situated/limited position – produced from mainly Global North, scholar-based positions – and their purpose to be dialogued within a wide audience in order to stay with the trouble of pluralizing and precising the academia we want in the Anthropocene. 

THE DISCUSSIONS

The information is organized not in a synthetic – closing to answers – but in a sympoietic way – opening to questions –, exposing the paradoxes and tensions that shaped our discussions, from the common circle to the small working groups. Below I have tried to present all the discussions in a simple manner, but since there are many ways to organize them I acknowledge that this way of summarizing has its limitations. Through the next two core-themes boxes you will find some questions that are worth asking, either if you are a scholar or if you want to know how to demand scholars’ responsibility in such a historical epoch.

1. VICISSITUDES OF CRITICAL WORK

We need narratives on how we ended up in such a historical situation. The way in which we scale the problems affects the solutions, but our scaling methods remain scholar-based – in a very similar way, our impact metrics are “internally” designed –; so we need to move beyond the academic walls. We need “new” knowledges and political compromises. This call for an opening to an “epistemic plurality” requires an “epistemic rupture”: the opening of our worlds requires the transformation of our worlds, but…

• How can we balance between the opening to a more public and political sphere and the value of our research?
• What does it mean to horizontalize academia? How could we achieve it, and to what extent is it worth it?
• Although professors recognize the positive aspects of engaging with larger alliances – as many historical episodes have shown with students, for example –, there are important barriers that make it even unthinkable to move between these social boundaries (in this sense, a participant mentioned that in Southern Europe students are figured as beings who study for grades, and even having a coffee with a professor is impossible). Effectively, neoliberal corporations measure and value separation from society as a “good neoliberal university”; and those are the ones that fund a great part of our projects.
• Should we aim for “new” institutions? And who is it strategically and politically meaningful to build up alliances with?

There is a relevant paradox within academia, where critical discourse is boosted but at the same time there is institutional repression against certain discourses or actions. This risk enhances the limited porosity and political impact of academic institutions, as well as reinforcing their complicity with the statu quo articulated by the dominating power systems and actors. How could we address this tension?

We should face another paradox. Universities are undergoing a neoliberalization which intensifies class/gender/racial segregation and market-based labor conditions (soft and uncertain funds for projects, employment insecurity, etc.), crashing down on people’s basic livelihoods (income, family, etc.); but we should keep defending the public university, moreover considering our responsibility from such a privileged position.

• How do we tackle this defense? Is it through reparation, rather than institutional change? Through mundane critical work? Through activism?
• Universities suffer from the “slow machinery of things”, and that makes it difficult to promote larger transformations. On the other hand, this quality may protect universities from populist instrumentalizations.
• A university could also be developed in a Mad Max scenario where societies are collapsed or repressive, so it may turn out to be needed. But to what extent is it necessary to sustain the form it has currently? 
• What does “public” mean? Currently many universities are aligned with the state’s positioning. Should we defend a state-based institution, or work towards a more democratic one? 

We find a necessity to push forward the limits of academia, to go beyond its existing structures through our actions. Which should our horizons be? Some of our answers were…

• Care and repair work;
• Keeping local ties as well as global interactions;
• Developing other modes of embodied and emplaced sense-making;
• Commoning practices which boost transformation through relational excess.

2. DESTABILIZING THE “ACADEMIA” FRAME

Academia is not such a well-defined entity separated from society. There are lots of liminal spaces (for example, some of us work as state-funded freelancers), and those flexible roles make it difficult to pursue long-term cultural actions or conviviality. We also mentioned other liminal examples (our bodies, which connect the system manipulations over our skin with the possibility for change if we listen to it; the AMOC current, which connects Global South with Global North through the Atlantic ocean…) that show our inherent ambivalent porosity. Working on the fringes makes it neither inside or outside academia.

Furthermore, we ask ourselves if we may be approaching the issue wrongly. Historically there has been critical intellectual work apart from academia, and this institution has not always been critical. We are focusing on academia, while there are lots of non-academics doing practice-based intellectual work. 

• Shouldn’t we focus more on fostering intellectual culture within more-than-academic spheres (including the representation of more-than-human species) and recognizing the critical intellectual work beyond academia? 
• How could we sustain such dialogue between knowledges? To what extent is it worth it?

THE SHORT-TALES AND SOME REFERENCES

Below you will find the tales that were co-created and told during the workshop as a materialization of commoning our concerns after framing the above issues collectively. These stories were imagined into small groups that gathered different ages, backgrounds, interests, knowledges… for a common purpose: dreaming stories that will help walk the academia we want in the Anthropocene; thereby you will find, more or less explicitly, critical keys pointing to that goal. Since the tale is the specific encounter between the teller and the audience, these transcriptions reflect the creative interactions that took place. Hopefully you will appreciate, take care and learn from these collaborative efforts!

Outerspace (pdf 1.0 MB)

Hedgerow (pdf 5.7 MB)

Left Han​​​​​​​d (pdf 274 kB) ​​​​​​​

KTH (pdf 236 kB) ​​​​​​​

Ladder (pdf 1.0 MB) ​​​​​​​

Archive (pdf 2.9 MB) ​​​​​​​

Protest (pdf 807 kB) ​​​​​​​

You will also find some references on the following link that frame our approach to the academia we want in the Anthropocene, and which have been shared by the participants along the process of this workshop. Check them and add yours if you like, so that we can keep learning together! 

References for Another Possible Academia, available here ​​​​​​​. ​​​​​​​

LAST (PERSONAL) COMMENTS

I would like to share some personal reflections and feelings in relation to this initiative. And first of all, I would like to thank deeply all the members from the Anthropocene History Centre who trusted in me and gave their support, as well as to the Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the other colleagues and administrators at the Department of Philosophy and History of KTH, Solidaritetshuset for opening this space for us, and all the participants that were willing to share their time and hearts. 

This workshop was sparked because many of us were wondering ‘are we approaching the problem properly?’. We are pursuing lots of theoretically and methodologically powerful research, we are organizing really interesting activities, we are modifying our budgets seeking a more sustainable performance… Is that enough? Is it even going in the right direction? For me it seems we are not taking the world we are telling seriously. Perhaps it is more a matter of affect rather than effects. What if, apart from counting the uncountable disasters which are being unfairly suffered, we began to feel with those calamities? What if we imagine ourselves, together with the hurricanes in Cuba or the war in Sudan, looking desperately for our mother, our daughter, our companion species under the rubble of a never-again-existing household? If we make the earth pains ours, what does it change?

I ended up with the idea for this workshop driven by these questions. The further commitment we are called for is already being tackled on multiple commoning tracks, and this initiative aims to contribute to those discursive practices beyond. Honestly, I feel partially proud and partially skeptical about the extent to which we achieved such a real contribution. However, struggle consists of accepting uncertainties and keep walking, so I would like to share some difficulties and limitations of the process behind the realization of the workshop so that each of you can reflect on your learnings from this initiative and its stories.

• There were some institutional limitations, since a public institution like KTH cannot afford the booking of a venue which is external to the existing contracted ones. Nonetheless, after justifying the relevance of such a venue we were given the approval and lots of help. Isn't it curious that our institutions seem not to be, at least sometimes, prepared for addressing such different involvements?
• Though we tried to reach a diverse audience, most of us at the workshop were scholar-associated. Word-of-mouth communication would have been a better strategy rather than sending emails (no surprise, but worth highlighting), and this learning points to the cruciality of embedded participation among different organizations (participating in their activities, having interest in their claims, etc.).
• I tried to facilitate participation during all the process (ideation, planification, realization, evaluation, etc.), but I feel like it was me choosing and maybe absorbing too much attention. I think it is worth reflecting on how to make more participatory facilitations and horizontal decision-making real, regardless of the type of action we are aiming for.
• Furthermore, I keep reflecting on how to bring a more active role of the human body and of more-than-human entities. Though we were discussing amazing words like “commoning”, “relational excess”, “multispecies justice”... it was just humans talking from their seats. How could we facilitate meaningful intrusions of these materialities?

Finally, one of my main concerns is continuity. Is something going to change after this activity? Are we going to make use of our strengthened networks somehow, or of the stories that concentrate such a rich amount of reflections? I feel there is a lack of clarity on the horizons that should guide our analysis and our actions. Nevertheless, I find a struggle at a planetary scale that calls for commitments onto the local and into dialogue between scales and geographies. From my situated position, I advocate we should be clearly pointing to and engaging with this common horizon until its last consequences. Such a common horizon stems from different pathways, thereby it is formulated in different terms; among others, I call it the fight for the preceding, befalling and forthcoming common good-living. 

The fight for Life.

Iván González Iglesias, 

November 22 of 2024