Since 2021, I have been a co-convenor of the online seminar series Germinations: Transdiscplinary Conversations in the Environmental Humanities in Latin America, hosted via the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. Organized with Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Ainhoa Montoya, Paul Merchant, and, in 2024, Alejandro Ponce de León, our 2024 cycle probed Amphibious Research and Practice through three gatherings that turned on the following co-authored concept:
Zones of emergence in the Environmental Humanities take form in the crossings of disciplines, knowledges and territories. These confluences can make practice and research amphibious in the thematic concerns they probe in liquid ecologies and in their tendency toward non-binary, transdisciplinary methods. In discussions surrounding ecosystems in art, ecology, and the social sciences, such adaptive approaches are particularly generative to think through and care for a world marked not by its fixity but by its flows. Attending to practices that flourish in fluid territories, GERMINATIONS is convening three conversations with researcher-practitioners working across theoretical approaches, arts-science intersections, technolegal landscapes, and cultural production that deal with amphibious modes of being and doing.
These encounters are an invitation to consider how amphibious practices draw on ecological knowledge, adaptive strategies, and creative resilience to enable ways of living in shifting and indeterminate environments. In the face of pressing issues such as climate change, attacks on diversity and resource scarcity, GERMINATIONS will highlight the ways in which communities resist, safeguarding their distinctive coexistence across amphibious realms as they intersect with evolving legal and technological paradigms emerging in water governance and sociopolitical frameworks. The series also seeks to engage with practices where art and science are interwoven and mutually imbricated, probing forms of life that resist definable categorisation, such as species and gender.
Emilio Chapela, harvesting of first cycle of Germinations.
Ursula Biemann, still from Forest Mind, 2021.
Rio Doce, Minas Gerais, after the Mariana dam collapse, 2015. Creative Commons