The resilient farmer, or spacetime entanglement
Assigned Session: FS 3.231: Holistic Resilience of Mountain Systems
Abstract ID: 3.13860 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA
Jamila Haider (1)
JR, Präa-Sepp (2)
(1) Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Ejderstigen 113, 18270 Stocksund, SE
(2) Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Frescativägen 8
Abstract
We are a sustainability researcher and a mountain farmer, Präa Sepp, who have come together through a project on farming resilience in Alpine areas in Austria. We developed a surprising friendship given our divergent worldviews on climate change and nature conservation (for example), and decided to write a book about our experience of navigating these differences in generative ways. In the presentation we focus on a chapter of our upcoming book “Mountain Spacetime” which focuses on our shift from representational to performative research. Key capacities of Sepp’s farming resilience can be represented as: creativity in the face of crisis, the importance of freedom and autonomy to maintain response-ability in the face of uncertainty, and the principles of sufficiency and circularity underlying farming practices. While these practices are singular, set in their specific context, they are also generalizable to some extent. Indeed, it is tempting to impart insights of farming resilience that could scale out to other farmers, or up to influence policy. But in our work together, Sepp and I would like to challenge what it means to enact, and to embody, meaningful change. Within ourselves, with each other, and the world of which we are. Through our research together I have seen how Sepp creates space to continuously deal with surprise and uncertainty. It’s not what he does, but how he does it. It’s how he becomes. It’s about thinking differently, doing differently, being differently. That opening ourselves up to other beings, humans and non-humans, heightens our feelings, enabling a perception of the world as it truly is: as entangled movement. We’re all capable of this way of being, but it requires openness to the new, and courage to let go. This is how Sepp farms. It’s how he becomes. We draw on work from feminist new materialist scholars to extend the notion of resilience as represented capacities, into the realm of entangled co-becoming, where researcher and farmer become part of the world, the processes, they seek to understand and influence.
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