JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Art and Non-Human Agencies, Dec 2022

These are a few of the infinite numbers of stories that were documented and analysed during a six-month observation of a single overlooked ecosystem and the connection it has to us and its surroundings. They are the stories of a single London pavement crack.

Adopting a fresh approach to autoethnographic writing, this article unfurls tactile encounters with the more-than-human through an active exercise in readership. Situating this within ecosexual and psycho-somatic framings, the text queers kinaesthetic encounter, presenting it as holding the potential for deeper connection, understanding and amity across species. Drawing on Konik and Konik’s notion of a ‘barefoot epistemology’ (2019: 80), and an overlay of sensorial, critical and reflective writing, the structure of the essay enacts a mimesis of the author’s own kinaesthetic encounter, exploring the provision of research writing to offer the reader their own embodied experience. Questions of research materiality support an enlivened research encounter.

The pandemic and youth-led activism worldwide have disrupted the order of education systems and exposed existing social and ecological inequalities of all Earthly beings. Under radical uncertainty, as transdisciplinary researchers, we created an artistic hundred-word writing piece with materials as participants. We framed this experiment within posthuman thought, which criticizes anthropocentric practices. We recognize the agency and the mutual relationality of humans and other-than-humans in our pedagogical practices and research. We are education researchers at various stages of our Ph.D. studies. In this artistic writing practice, we share our diverse projects: a speculative creation of space, a multispecies ethnography of becoming-with dust and a visual ethnography of urban artistic activism. Following Berlant and Stewart’s (2019)The Hundreds, we partake in each other’s research journeys through hundred-word units. The collaboration engages our rethinking of art and environmental education to answer the call for social and ecological justice.

Fluid Grounds is a practice-based research project which investigates existing water management strategies in London, as well as exploring alternatives. It brings together immersive research, regenerative design and contemporary modes of production. This results in a strategic analysis and critical positioning for creative practices within climate change adaptation practices. Additionally, two speculative provocations: Higher Grounds, a configuration of water and land product archetypes, and Extended Foliage, a series of 3D ceramics printed form studies, demonstrate the possibilities of regenerative design in uncertain conditions.

This investigation into the author’s master’s thesis in architecture starts from an observation that our current ways of coping with waste sustain an obliviousness and feed a lack of responsibility towards the waste we produce and the way it is treated. Moving towards more effective ecological living patterns, but deviating from a strong adherence to technology, raises the question of how architecture can trigger a shift in mindsets on how we deal with waste. While ecological thinking and acting in the field of architecture are often focused on materials and their cycles of re-use and durability, the waste this research consciously takes interest in is of a more uncanny kind. Human bodily waste is the waste exchanged by mediation of the architectural element of the toilet. Instead of focusing on a fast and total removal of waste from our home, can architecture apply principles of care for waste as a vibrant matter? Aspiring to evoke ecological awareness, a low-tech toilet design is scrutinized in this article for its potential to perform care from a thigmophiliac point of view, as well as for producing compost.

This article explores the notions of observation and analysis with the purpose of achieving a globalized point of view, through the lens of two different segments of work: one related to the human body and another related to the landscape. The aim is to examine the possibility of internal and external observation being the two facets of one and the same act, in order to bridge the dichotomy between fragment and totality.

This article, written as a puppet show, presents playfulness as a tool that can be used to formulate a new understanding of matter, following the elaboration of this concept by the philosophical movement ‘new materialism’. The relation between human and non-human, together with the boundaries that separate them, is explored through examples of contemporary art practices. The text is shaped in a theatrical and playful manner to test these concepts, considering both their potentialities and risks.