Seedcorn 2023/2024
On a recent Anthropocene walk around Bristol for undergraduate History students, Mathilde Braddock of Steps in Stone placed human history in the context of Earth history. Imagine the 4.6 billion years that the Earth has existed as a twenty-four-hour clock, she instructed the group. Homo sapiens make their entrance at 4 seconds to midnight. This creative technique lays bare the vastly different scales of time needed to comprehend the Anthropocene: the proposed geological epoch in which humans have become an Earth-altering force.
What will the project involve?
The project aims to bring together a group of scholars and practitioners who have identified shared interests in working broadly around the concept of the Anthropocene/environmental change, but who have not yet worked together collaboratively. The group want to think creatively about how to engage researchers, students and non-university groups in understanding and responding to planetary change. Their collaboration will focus on the following three questions:
- How have different disciplines and creative practices approached the multiple temporalities of the Anthropocene?
- What creative techniques can we (academic and practitioners) use to engage students and publics with the challenges of planetary environmental change?
- Can these practices help move us towards new research collaborations and teaching initiatives that connect theory with action?
These questions will be focused by the team on the central theme of waste/decay. The notion of decay relies on an understanding of change over time; ‘waste’, a verb, adjective, and noun, captures some of the places (wastelands), activities (extravagant expenditure) and processes (degradation) that help us understand global environmental crises. It also describes the material outcomes of human activity that we don’t know what to do with. But perhaps most potently, as scholars working within discard studies have identified, wasting describes a series of relationships producing wasted human and non-human beings, that has at its heart a practice of ‘othering’.
Waste, in its different forms, requires us to confront Anthropocene temporalities. Historical wastes create environmental injustice in the present; waste created today casts the problem far into the future. The different scales of time and agency can be difficult to parse; this project aims to collectively explore the tensions, contrasts and connections around issues of waste and time in the Anthropocene from Humanities and Earth Science perspectives.
Waste and decay are environmental issues; they are also part of the day-to-day management of historical materials in archives, museums, and cultural institutions. This project will work with two cultural partners, Bristol Museum and University of Bristol Special Collections, to incorporate and centre practices of curation, preservation, and public storytelling in the project’s activities and conversations. The project aims to showcase the collections there are in Bristol for participants think critically about how the Anthropocene is reshaping the narratives we find in objects and records.
The team intend to co-produce responses to waste and time in the Anthropocene through three day-long workshops. Two will foreground creative methods, materials, and research questions; the third will provide space to develop avenues for further collaboration among the participants and partners. All rely on a uniting principle of co-creation throughout, with participants playing active roles in rather than spectating; and on radical interdisciplinarity that foregrounds the potential for Humanities and Earth Science to build novel research connections; for Earth Science to work with Bristol Museums and Special Collections, and for Humanities and the cultural partners to progress emergent ideas for future research.
Who are the team and what do they bring?
- Marianna Dudley (History, University of Bristol) is part of the Environmental Humanities Research cluster and an environmental historian of modern Britain. Her work explores environmental change and its impacts on communities, places, and politics.
- Alison Rust (Earth Sciences, University of Bristol) specialises in physical vulcanology and studies the dynamics of volcanic processes using a combination of laboratory experiments, theoretical fluid mechanics, fieldwork and petrology. Her research is motivated by volcanic problems but there are broader applications. She likes to work with geoscientists, mathematicians and engineers to explore connections between environmental, geophysical and industrial issues.
- Mathilde Braddock (Steps in Stone) is an environmental activist and educator. She is passionate about sharing the stories of the landscape and rocks of our planet, (re)connecting with the world around us in new ways. In her work, she engages participants in conversations about environmental issues in a safe and supported context, bridging the gap between the deep history of our planet and the world we see today.
What is to come?
The primary outcome of this project are the three workshops, which will be collaborative and generative in nature:
1) Deep Time and Wasting Energy
This day-long workshop will bring together Mathilde Braddock’s creative practice of educating public audiences on Anthropocene and geological histories through walking in the city, with research by Claire Corkhill (Professor of Mineralogy and Radioactive Waste Management, Bristol) on the long future of nuclear waste. Attendees will engage with embodied creative practices which will purposefully bring into perspective the multiple, and often mind-blowing, temporalities of the Anthropocene (e.g. coal deposited over 20 million years, extracted over 200 years and associated waste/emissions extending into the future; nuclear waste created in 20th and 21st century, radiating for 100,000 years into the future).
This workshop will support Mathilde to design a walkshop that combines her ‘Steps in Stone’ approach of walking in Bristol, connecting people to their local sense of place and history; and, the ‘Deep Time Walk’ approach that maps the passing of time onto the distance covered (e.g. 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s history translates to 4.6km), with co-production and input from project participants. One of the project outputs is to explore how this model might work as an interdisciplinary teaching initiative that could bring together Humanities and Earth Sciences students productively, in Workshop 3.
This will be followed by session led by Claire Corkhill on the environmental and social challenges that nuclear waste management is generating, and how researchers are responding. Claire and Mathilde will work together to produce a workshop which weaves together the embodied creative practices of the walk with academic knowledge and research questions. The day will explore how we build narrative and tell stories about the past and the future, in our work and lives, in particular to inspire action in a time of planetary environmental change.
2) Objects, archives, and decay.
This second day workshop will focus on issues of time, environmental change, and decay in archives. Isla Gladstone (Bristol Museum) will lead an exploration of the Museum collections and store; and Nicky Sugar of Special Collections will lead a showcase of the Wildfilm archive of natural history documentary films. Change and decay will be explored as a material presence and challenge for archivists, and as a potential opportunity for rethinking approaches to curation and storytelling. Following the object-focused explorations, a workshop will explore the key questions arising from the collaborations. These might include: How has environmental change been inscribed on film, in documents, in animal objects, and geological objects? How do the ways time is both frozen and made fluid by these collections affect knowledge and storytelling about environmental change today? How do notions of significance and use change accordingly? How do different groups and institutions participate in the construction of knowledge through material?
3) Where next? Workshop
This workshop will focus on identifying the gaps and questions that could drive further research and collaboration between participants, and identifying possible avenues for funding. Participants can reflect on particular practices and insights that generated meaning for their own research/practice, and space will be made to consider how this could be supported and developed. It is envisaged that there might be a range of potential avenues, at different scales and with different levels of input from participants. The team envisage, for example, individual-led research projects AND strengthening the partnerships between the University and cultural partners. We aim for this workshop to be imaginative, open to multiple ideas and strands, and to place participants advantageously to be responsive to future research funding calls. It is important to include Special Collections and the Museum in these explorations as cultural and heritage partners, particularly from local authorities, often struggle to get a seat at the table at the developmental stages of academic projects, despite holding incredible raw materials for the research processes.
The team will also write a blog post reflecting on the project aims and activities by the core participants, for the Centre for Environmental Humanities.