The perception of time is a funny thing. The week seems to have started quickly, slowed down, and then ramped up and disappeared. Most of this week (and part of next week) is a strike week for many, including within Universities. Not everyone can strike, but solidarity can be shown through contributions to the strike fund.
On Monday I was catching up on ‘Patterns in Practice‘, a research project focused on values, beliefs and emotions surrounding different cultures of machine learning practice. My role here is concerned with the arts, and arts practice, and I caught up with the postdoc doing the qualitative interviews with practitioners, who was planning a focus group to discuss in more depth the emerging insights. On Tuesday we had an all team meeting, to catch up on various aspects of the project. It is always great to catch up across the research team – we have had quite a few abstracts and paper accepted, for our work to be presented at various conferences, with different disciplinary perspectives, and we are planning for dialogue events between practitioners and the key public audiences, to share insights from the work.
Monday evening I was invited to see, ‘Finite: The Climate of Change‘, a film focused on activists living in protest camps in Germany and the UK, resisting corporate destruction of an ancient forest, and rural landscapes and wildlife from plans to create an opencast coalmine, respectively. The film articulates the frustrating irony of politicians talking about achieving netzero carbon emissions by transitioning to clean energy sources and protecting wildlife on the one hand at summits like COP, and yet on the other hand protecting the financial interests and profit margins of companies extracting fossil fuels, that pollutes the atmosphere, destroys wildlife and affects the wellbeing of local communities.
The German activists portrayed in the film built an intricate network of treehouses within the forest, from which to intertwine their own lives with the life of the forest, and of course both come under threat, as, spoiler alert, they face violent eviction by the police. One protestor, attached by a rope to the trees, shouts at the incoming police force, ‘are you just going to say in the future that you just followed orders?‘.
To make the film, director Rich Felgate, an activist, as well as a filmmaker, lived in and amongst the protestors to make the film, but also crowdsourced the funding. There was a fleeting reference in the film to the fact that the UK and Germany’s failure to mitigate against and reduce carbon dioxide emissions impacts the lives of communities at the frontline of climate change as a legacy of colonialism and industrialisation. Yet the film failed to make the narrative link (unless I fell asleep in these parts) to the struggles of indigenous communities protecting forests or campaigning against oil discoveries that impact and erase indigenous people, such as the Ogoni people. Those kinds of connections, could not only have opened up the film to non-white audiences, who have been struggling for decades and centuries against brutal imperial forces, but also importantly, could have forged solidarity with international social movements. It was left to the panel to attempt to articulate this, and to be fair, it took up most of the discussion, until we were kicked out to make room for another film screening.
The film gives an insight into the strategies and tactics of both movements in the UK and Germany, and how they make use of environmental laws, to protect endangered species like the great crested newt (see pic above) whose habitats are protected by law. The people in the film were handling the creature, which I am not sure was such a good idea.
Tuesday I was in Bristol for a workshop at Pervasive Media Studios, on Bristol’s Harbourside to create a desire and conjure up imaginings of alternative technologies to the ‘metaverse’, an integrated network of virtual worlds, a concept that has evolved from a dystopian world within a science fiction novel, and co-opted by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook cum Meta.
I also had a couple of meetings with PhD students, not my own, but who had reached out to get my perspectives on coloniality and intersectionality within higher education. I took the opportunity to revisit Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought on the train to bring these perspectives in conversation with one another, but perhaps from a UK perspective, there are more relevant black British academics for consideration, alongside the lived experiences of politically black academics in the UK. It’s way too long to talk about that here, but scholars like Deborah Gabrielle, Nicola Rollock, Sara Ahmed, Jason Arday, Remi Joseph Salisbury and Azeezat Johnson cover this ground.
The rest of the week was pretty quiet as folks are striking across the UK, including within Universities. It is worth noting the strikes and protests in Paris, as people took to the street and withdrew their labour in light of President Macron pushing a bill through parliament, without a vote, to raise pension age from 62 to 64 in France.
There is a deep connection threading through much that I witnessed last week, linked to the ramping up of economic productivity post-pandemic, and as part of that a failure to engage people in the kinds of futures we might desire to have, in favour of automated protection of certain values and beliefs.
Asad Rehman (War on Want) one of the panellists at the discussion following the screening of ‘Finite’, summed it up best in saying that neoliberalism robs us of the capacity to imagine the futures we need and that we need to ‘increase the opportunity to reimagine‘ outside of the current status quo. The current status quo is a kind of automation in a sense, it represents a structural entrenchment, tying our futures to a deeply undesirable past.
It is in this space of reimagining, but also surfacing and critiquing the status quo, and considering alternatives, that my work sits. Carving out that space is currently steeped in the joys of administration.
Relevant articles:
The call for reparations: https://waronwant.org/news-analysis/call-climate-reparations
New research into the metaverse… https://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/uwenews/news.aspx?id=4229
everyoneandeverything 