It's official, Oika is worthy of anthropological research!
The practice for the future – of anthropology, art, ecology, and many more disciplines – will move beyond limits artificially imposed by the history of academic institutions.There's an exploratory world where artists, scientists, and researchers from many disciplines are thinking and making together. Syring is an anthropologist entranced by questions of how cultural and natural worlds entwine. He has talked with artists, scientists, philosophers, poets, and others enacting an emergent paradigm shift in how we ask questions. Traversing beyond disciplinary boundaries is essential for understanding the "metacrisis" that humans currently face. This work can move through understanding to actions that regenerate the world to create, as Dr. Rich Blundell frames it, "a conception of human intelligence that is deep, relational, artful in nature, and the only basis for a beautiful future." This late-breaking conversation with artist Rita Leduc and ecologist and cultural communicator Rich Blundell will highlight rich collaborations facilitated by Oika, "a scientifically informed, spiritually inspired and culturally creative response to the spectrum of crises threatening the flourishing of life on Earth" (oika.com). Our session will focus on findings from their summer 2024 fieldwork.Leduc and Blundell began collaborating in 2021 with "Extending Ecology" at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (oika.com/extending-ecology-1). As that work continues, their collaboration has expanded to include Oika: Nantucket (oika.com/oika-nantucket), a project that began in 2022 when Blundell served as visiting scientist-in-residence at the Maria Mitchell Association. In 2023, Blundell guided Leduc and three other artists (Dena Haden, Dakota LaCroix, and Robert Peters) as they embarked on individual and collective research on and with the island. Offerings from this transdisciplinary, scientific and creative research include Oika-themed curricula such as geology talks, earth story walks, Big History nights, workshops, talks, courses, and mentorship.This year, the project has expanded into scientific and creative research on ocean acidification and its impacts on eelgrass in Nantucket Harbor. In August, Blundell facilitated the deployment of two sensors: a buoy to monitor ph, nutrient levels, dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity and chlorophyll in the water column, as well as an artist (Leduc) who brings her unique, rigorous method of art-inquiry to the field and into dialogue with ecological research. The team is investigating potential entanglement between these two data sets as well as what multiple ways of sensing might teach us about relating to our world.Our conversation will focus on ecological futures, intelligence (in natural systems, human, artificial, and otherwise), and how the development of new practices and applications for anthropology and other approaches to knowing afford us capacities to participate in the paradigm shift into the Beautiful Future.
