FHI Seed Funded Projects 2023-2024
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Eco-poetry as activism, climate action and interdisciplinary environmental knowledge-making
Dr Yairen Jerez Columbié
There is still limited information on the specific methodologies and perspectives that eco-poetry brings to wider interdisciplinary environmental scholarship. The FHI seed-funding made possible the one-day hybrid symposium “Eco-poetry as Activism, Climate Action and Interdisciplinary Environmental Knowledge-Making”, which brought together scholars and practitioners from AHSS and STEM disciplines to gather evidence of the specific Arts and Humanities methodologies that emerge from producing and studying eco-poetry. This symposium was instrumental for refining the methodology for the major project ECO-ARCHIPELAGO – ‘Articulating a Global Archipelagic Eco-Poetics of Relations: Resisting Disasters Through Cultural Representations and Creative Practice from the Hurricane Belt and the Ring of Fire’. ECO-ARCHIPELAGO will study creative responses to environmental degradation from the entangled cultural epicentres of the world’s main disaster-prone areas, to propose a global archipelagic eco-poetics of relations as both a cultural concept and a methodological approach for creatively responding to the ongoing climate crisis.
Yairen Jerez Columbié is the author of the monograph Essays on Transculturation and Catalan-Cuban Intellectual History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the books of poetry Fósiles de lluvia (Betania, 2022) and De corales (Betania, 2024), among other publications; she works as Lecturer in Latin American Studies at UCC (UCC Research Profiles: Yairen Jerez Columbié)
Aesthetic Communication: The role of the senses in social interaction, across and beyond the human
Dr Tatsuma Padoan
This project, sponsored by the FHI and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, aimed at investigating the role of bodily perception in social life, looking at verbal and nonverbal semiotic practices of communication. We proposed to analyse the aesthetics of communication in everyday practices, including but not limited to artistic expression, in order to find new ways to understand the social role of sensory and affective interaction in producing and interpreting meanings and identities at the individual and collective level, as well as across and beyond the human. By bringing together 16 scholars working on linguistic anthropology, interspecies ethnography, semiotics, STS, film & screen media, as well as video-makers, we opened up a methodological conversation not only about the possibility of using an interdisciplinary approach to discuss the role of senses in interactions with humans, deities, spirits, wolves, artefacts, etc. but also about how to use different multimedia approaches to convey the sensory experience of sociality.
Dr Tatsuma Padoan is Lecturer in East Asian Religions and codirector of SENSA Lab at UCC; as an anthropologist and a semiotician, he has worked on ritual and pilgrimage in Japan, as well as on the study of design practices and the politics of urban space (UCC Research Profiles: Tatsuma Padoan). Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at UCC. Marilena Frisone is a social anthropologist, working as Assistant Lecturer for the MA Anthropology programme at UCC. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at UCC. Dan O'Connell is Lecturer in Filmmaking at UCC.
Hedge Humanities: Entangled ecologies, economies, law, and communities on marginal land
Dr Oisín Wall
Taken as a whole, hedges constitute three quarters of a million entangled kilometres of linear ecology. This narrow but vast expanse of marginal land is approximately four and a half times the size of the country’s largest National Park. For centuries, it has supported diverse ecologies, complex economies, and nomadic communities. However, throughout modernity it has been narrowed, domesticated, and eradicated. The funding enabled a two-day scoping event to discuss the possibility of a large-scale grant application with potential partners and stakeholders. It included an interdisciplinary project leadership team, museums, ecological organisations, and community-based organisations. Throughout the event we discussed the project’s methodological approach, which will explore new ways of agglomerating disciplinary approaches around a single object to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But we also discussed the importance of what we termed ‘a methodology of generosity’ in the early development of a project.
Dr Oisín Wall is a historian of marginalised communities in modern Ireland (UCC Research Profiles: Oisín Wall)