Influencers
The following are some of the writings, listenings, musings from the field that have influenced the creation of lolligram- a partial lineage of learning.
Akomilafe, Bayo. March, 2020. Coming Down to Earth (Blog Post/Essay). https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/coming-down-to-earth
“What do the protestors and the protested share? A loss of the miraculous…Because modernity centralizes rationality/human experience, and instrumentalizes the nonhuman world as resource for human ends (that is, refusing to see the nonhuman world as powerful on its own terms), power and enchantment are always in short supply relative to deepening demand….
We now live in fugitive times, and fugitive times require fugitive epistemologies, or ways of knowing. Deploying the settler epistemologies that contributed to the geo-ecological hostilities of the present risks reinforcing the dynamics we want to address. The promise of fugitivity… is that in a sense it helps resacralize the world, ministering to our weary bones by drawing ‘god’ closer – so intimately close, in fact, that we lose some of the categorical independence modernity burdened us with. One might say fugitivity is the theology of incalculability and hopelessness. The fugitive rejects the promise of repair and refuses the hope of the established order. By clinging to outlawed desires, barely perceptible imaginations, alien gestures, the fugitive inhabits the moving wilds….
We need unprecedented forms of organizing. We need more than hope, more than just a plan. We need composting, the disciplining decentering of a different metaphysics of destruction. I believe this homelessness/hopelessness we are being habituated into, this summons to fugitivity, away from the ethics of inclusivity versus exclusivity, creates room for sanctuary – and not just ‘isolated’ practices, but a movement of shared inquiries into our times. An intergenerational yatra of researching the otherwise. A networking of approaches in a heterogeneous ecology of multiple approaches to making sanctuary, each held together by the not-knowing and the accountability to others around us. A posthuman and posthumanist, liberation theology in which trees and desks are invited discussants and contributors.”
Angharad E. B, P Bagguley & T Campbell (2017) Foucault, social movements and heterotopic horizons: rupturing the order of things, Social Movement Studies, 16:2, 169-181
“‘rhizomic’ heterotopias can be understood as those that are counter-normative because they involve the ‘wrong’ type of organization. They are characterized by latitude, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and creativity. This might, for example, be seen in social movement activity submerged within everyday life, involving everyday, autonomous activities. Such heterotopias are random and discontinuous in their spreading.” P. 13
Barad, Karen (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28:3
“The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.”
Boggs, Grace Lee. (2011) The Next American Revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. University of California Press.
“We must define revolution both by the humanity-stretching ends to be achieved and the beloved community-building means by which to achieve those ends.” p.15
Brown, A.M. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
“Together we must move like waves. Have you observed the ocean? The waves are not the same over and over—each one is unique and responsive. The goal is not to repeat each other’s motion, but to respond in whatever way feels right in your body. The waves we create are both continuous and a one-time occurrence. We must notice what it takes to respond well. How it feels to be in a body, in a whole—separate, aligned, cohesive. Critically connected.” p. 13
Escobar, Arturo (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press
“There is a deep connection between action and experience, which in turn instills a certain circularity in all knowledge, which Maturana and Varella summarize with the maxim “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”, or by saying that “every act of knowing brings forth a world”. This coincidence of being-doing-knowing implies that we are deeply immersed in the world along with other sentient beings, who are similarly and ineluctably knower-doers as much as ourselves.” p. 101
Howe, Fanny. Bewilderment. https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_1_1999/fhbewild.html
"You would think I was talking about a ghost, or a hallucination, or a dream, when in fact, I was trying to convey the experience of a certain event as scattered, and non-sequential.
I can keep UN-saying what I said, and amending it, but I can't escape the given logic of the original proposition, the sentence which insists on tenses and words like "later" and "before".
And it is with this language problem that bewilderment begins to form, for me, more than an attitude--but an actual approach, a way--to resolve the unresolvable.
In the Dictionary, to bewilder is "to cause to lose one's sense of where one is."
The wilderness as metaphor is in this case not evocative enough because causing a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars and the movement of the rivers is more than getting lost in the woods.”
Kapil, Bhanu (2021) The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kelsey St Press
“I answered the questions for myself again and again. My responses were set down in a notebook, on scraps, or written on stickers that I affixed to escalator tubing, cafe tables, shop windows. The voices of the women I met: pure sound. The shapes they made, as they moved through the world: methods. A way to describe my body. I didn’t know where I was going.” p. 1
Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Platns. Milkweed Editions.
“The gifts [my students] might return to cattails are as diverse as those the cattails gave them. This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world? As I listen to them, I hear another whisper from the swaying stand of cattails, from the spruce boughs in the wind, a reminder that caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack… In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” p. 240
Korolkova, Maria & Simon Bowes (2020) Mistake as method: Towards an epistemology of errors in creative practice and research. NECSUS 9:2. 139–157
“reality is a constantly evolving multiplicity composed of an infinite constellation of singular events that are never stable but are always becoming. We cannot make our way into this multiplicity, into this mess except by way of mistake, or rather by attending with care to whatever might seem mistaken. Indeed, dominant approaches to method work with some success to repress the very possibility of mess. Simplicity, for simplicity’s sake, will not save us, or guide us, it will not help us to understand messes or mistakes we make, and perhaps we should resist the learned temptation to clean them up, ‘to eat your epistemology greens’ and ‘wash hands after messing with the real world’. Instead, we detour, we err, we make mistakes…. Why do we not walk our research…through a psychogeographical map of erring? Formalists suggested that mistakes can form a methodological base for analysing this messy world – its constructive principle…. can we ask if the method itself is already always a mistake?”
Loorz, Victoria (2021). Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred. Broadleaf Books.
“In the beginning there was the Logos. And the Logos was with God. And the Logos was God. This was God in the beginning. All things came into being through this, and apart from this, nothing came into being that has come into being… And the Logos became flesh, and dwelt among us… The idea of a divine indwelling at the center of the whole universe, with every unique part in conversation with the others, has many names. What Thich Nhat Hanh names the web of interbeing is aligned with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls sacred reciprocity. David Whyte calls it the conversational nature of reality, and quantum scientist David Bohm uses the term implicate order. Martin Luther King Jr. called it an inescapable network of mutuality, which he said was “tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The ancient ancestors of Christianity called it logos.” Ch. 6
Lugones, Maria (2010) Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25:4.
“Resistant subjectivity often expresses itself infra-politically, rather than in a politics of the public, which has an easy inhabitation of public contestation. Legitimacy, authority, voice, sense, and visibility are denied to resistant subjectivity. Infra-politics marks the turn inward, in a politics of resistance, toward liberation. It shows the power of communities of the oppressed in constituting resistant meaning and each other against the constitution of meaning and social organization by power. In our colonized, racially gendered, oppressed existences we are also other than what the hegemon makes us be. That is an infra-political achievement. If we are exhausted, fully made through and by micro and macro mechanisms and circulations of power, "liberation" loses much of its meaning or ceases to be an intersubjective affair. The very possibility of an identity based on politics (Mignolo 2000) and the project of de-coloniality loses its peopled ground.”
Maturana, Humberto, Verden-Zoller, G. and Bunnell, P. (2008). The Origin of Humanness and the Biology of Love. Imprint Academic.
“we each exist as part of the medium for each other. Human body-hoods and human manners-of-living change congruently with each other as a mere consequence of being structure-determined systems in recursive interaction with each other while simultaneously changing congruently with the rest of our media. So as human beings we are neither our body-hoods nor our behavior, rather we are continuous systemic dynamics that takes place in the interplay between body-hood and behavior, and we exist as languaging beings in a relational space that arises in that dynamics…. Under these circumstances human beings, as is the case with all living systems, with systems in general, with the biosphere and the cosmos itself, exist in their continuous realization as structure determined systems in a permanent changing present. Furthermore human beings (as is the case with all composite entities) exist through their many dimensions of interactions as participants of the interrelated congruent structural changes that interconnect all of the elements.” p.29-31
Odell, Jenny. (2019) How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House.
“When I try to imagine a sane social network it is a space of appearance: a hybrid of mediated and in-person encounters, of hours-long walks with a friend, of phone conversations, of closed group chats, of town halls. It would allow true conviviality— the dinners and gatherings and celebrations that give us the emotional sustenance we need, and where we show up for each other in person and say, “I am here fighting for this with you.” p. 179
O Tuama, Padraig (2017). Daily Prayer With the Corrymeela Community. Canterbury Press.
"So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.”
Perez, Laura (2019). Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial. Duke University Press.
“Writing with a crooked lines of our lives against the grain of dominating cultures is a serpentine journey of embodied, increasingly aware, spiritualized being. It is a multiply sourced feeling-sensing-thinking-being of constant growth and fluidity that seeks to make harmonious connections across time in space, across cultures and geographies, across the span of living and the disincarnate, in search of deeper truths: the kind of truths that will allow us to re-capture the power and energy necessary to transform self, humanity, and society for the greater good. Shedding the old skins of profoundly wounded and wounding excessively profit driven and materialist culture s/Spirit that is l/Life escapes moribund ideologies, with the heart as a compass, shifting in transformation, enacting the yes that lies within our powers. p. 209
Pinto, Sayra (2015). The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community. (Dissertation). Union Institute and University.
“Nanopolitics serves as a construct through which to examine political activity that is not contingent on belonging to organizations, or on being franchised according to accepted societal norms but that is also not only conscribed to the body but rather to the webs of relationships between individuals and their communities. Nanopolitics therefore is a useful framework about which to build theory and through which one can observe how core human functions such as knowledge making, leadership, and community organizing occur at that level.”
Rich, Adrienne (1993) What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. Norton.
“There is a tough and searching empathy; the poet is not outside of nature, looking in: she is observant and participant, a different yet kindred being who instinctively responds to growth, deprivation, persistence, wildness, tameness.”
Jennings, Willie James (2020) After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. William B Eerdman’s Publishing.
“Caught in the powerful currents of a history that moves through us, we inhabit a social world constricted through whiteness that has left us with limited options for imagining how we might be with each other. That social world, to be clear, does not need the presence of peoples of European descent to be active, strong and destructive. it only needs desire deformed by colonialist urges to control bodies, aimed toward their objectification and exploitation. The distorted erotic power that fuels that world must be freed from its captivity to whiteness and turned back toward its source in divine desire. We can start again. … By reframing theological education and Western education more broadly through a formation within the erotic power of God to gather together, I am turning attention to the original trajectory of a God who has ended hostility and has drawn all of creation into a reconciliation that we do not control. God offers us an uncontrollable reconciliation, one that aims to re-create us, reforming us as those who enact gathering and who gesture communion with our very existence. We end hostility. This, of course, is a dream, but it is God’s dream.” p. 152
Sandiford, Marc (Director) and Nungak, Z (Collaborating Director). (2006). Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny [Film].
“This documentary pokes fun at the ways in which Inuit people have been treated as “exotic” documentary subjects by turning the lens onto the strange behaviours of Qallunaat (the Inuit word for white people). The term refers less to skin colour than to a certain state of mind: Qallunaat greet each other with inane salutations, repress natural bodily functions, complain about being cold, and want to dominate the world. Their odd dating habits, unsuccessful attempts at Arctic exploration, overbearing bureaucrats and police, and obsession with owning property are curious indeed.”
Shotwell, Alexis (2016). Against Purity. University of Minnesota Press.
“I offer normative guidance for life-promotion with the concept of flourishing- situated, historically placed, contingent. How we pursue flourishing… will always involve an in-process, syncretic, speculative fabulation, an improvisational engagement with emergence….” p.9
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies. Zed Publishers
“One of the concepts through which Western ideas about the individual and community, about time and space, knowledge and research, imperialism and colonialism can be drawn together is the concept of distance. The individual can be distanced, or separated, from the physical environment, the community…Distance again separated individuals in power from the subjects they governed. It was all so impersonal, rational, and extremely effective. In research the concept of distance is most important as it implies a neutrality and objectivity on behalf of the researcher… What it has come to stand for is objectivity…Research ‘through imperial eyes’ describes an approach which assumes that Western ideas about the most fundamental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only rational ideas, and the only ideas which can make sense of the world, of reality, of social life, and of human beings…It is research which from indigenous perspectives ‘steals’ knowedge from others and then uses it to benefit the people who ‘stole’ it. Some would call the approach simply racist. (p. 58)
…School knowledge systems…were informed by a much more comprehensive system of knowledge which linked universities, scholarly societies and imperial views of culture. Hierarchies of knowledge and theories which had rapidly developed to account for the discoveries of the new world were legitimated at the center. Schools simply reproduced domesticated versions of that knowledge for uncritical consumption. Although colonial universities saw themselves as being part of an international community and inheritors of a legacy of Western knowledge, they were also part of the historical processes of imperialism. They were established as an essential part of the colonizing process, a bastion of civilization and a sign that a colony and its settlers had “grown up.”” p. 68
Nxumalo, Fikile & Eve Tuck. Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Session 11 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX6FA2uYK6k
“I’m interested in research as a craft, inquiry as a craft… we make this work… because it’s interesting and beautiful and connective for us to do… it allows me to see other possibilities for research.” (Eve Tuck)
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. (1997) Methodology in the fold and the irruption oftransgressive data, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10:2, 175-189
“My understanding of emotional data, dream data, and sensual data seems to have emerged from a close analysis of barely intelligible transgressive data produced by my own subjectivity, and yet I hardly ever worked in isolation during my study. I was haunted by Spivak ’s warning that ‘what I cannot imagine stands guard over everything I must do, think, live’. Research is so hard, and I knew I needed other people to help me think, since I feared I would commit some horrible and unforgivable blunder, disgrace myself in my own hometown, embarrass my mother who still lives there, and do irrevocable damage to the women I had grown to admire and love. If we believe that personal experience is a shaky basis for epistemology and if we are increasingly suspicious of the `lone scholar’ approach to knowledge construction, then perhaps we are obliged to bring the outside into our research projects. I deliberately sought the Other, many different others, at every stage of the research process, knowing that my very limited, partial, and situated position in the world was both productive and dangerous”
Tallbear, Kim (Spring, 2019). Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming. Kalfou, 6(1), 24-41.
“In order to sustain good relations among all the beings that inhabit these lands, we must undercut settler (property) relations. Instead of killing the Indian to save the man, we must turn the ontological table. The 21st-century mantra must be to kill the settler and save us all. Or as my Indigenous studies colleague and Lakota relative Nick Estes put it in an email to me, we must commit “settler ontocide.” p.15
Wheatley, Meg and Margaret Kellner-Rogers (1996). A Simpler Way. BK Publishers.
“We thought we could decide what we wanted and then create the world in our own images. But we have not succeeded very well. The world is too insistent on its own processes of invention. It seeks to discover what’s possible. It encourages us to tinker with new affiliations and see what works. What skills and capacities become available to us now that there is a relationship? What are we capable of now that we’re together? An emergent world asks us to stand in a different place. We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualize in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead, we must stand at the beginning, clear in our intent, with a willingness to be involved in discovery. The world asks that we focus less on how we can coerce something to make it conform to our designs and focus more on how we can engage with one another, how we can enter into the experience and then notice what comes forth.” (p. 73)
Willey, Angela (2016) Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Duke University Press
“I see the flicker of an unrealized dream of dyke science: an approach to materiality that is ever self-reflexive, ever engaged with critique of science, and ever aware of its own situatedness as a knowledge project. Such an approach would recognize the importance of proliferating sciences (and not consolidating epistemic authority) to anti-imperial projects of worlding. Why a dyke science? It’s a placeholder of sorts> I choose it for now, for this epilogue, because in this book I’ve offered a dyke ethics of friendship and community valuation that decenters sex as an alternative to debating the naturalness and efficacy of monogamy and nonmonogamy. I’ve also argued for a reading of “dyke” as a term that captures the at-once-ness of the embodied/corporeal and political/historical nature of desire… I mean for a dyke science to connote both of these meanings. A dyke science would be grounded in and accountable to the political critiques and insights of queer feminisms regarding marriage, family, the compulsory status of sexuality, and the unevenly distributed costs wrought by their naturalization. Recognizing the risks of reducing bodies to “nature” or “culture,” a dyke science would also be naturecultural in its approaches. I use “science” to refer to an intellectual project that would concern itself centrally with the proper objects of the natural sciences: bodies and the worlds in which they are coevolving.” p. 145
Young, Ayana (Host). (2021, September 15). Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe) on Humanity’s Homecoming (No. 251) [Audio podcast episode]. In For the Wild. https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/woman-stands-shining-pat-mccabe-on-humanitys-homecoming-251
“if sustainability is the highest and most sought after technology on the planet, Who should we be talking to? We should be talking to those people who have known how to live in one place over an extended period of time, say 1000 years or 5000 years or 10,000 years or 20,000 years, in relative health, harmony, and happiness. And we call these people Indigenous peoples. So their science is sound, their social technologies are sound, this whole continent was filled with 1000s of different cultures with unintelligible languages, different cosmologies different understanding of the Divine so to speak, and yet they coexisted. They coexisted here in kind of a remarkable way, certainly relative to what our social technologies are able to give us in modern world paradigm. So, you know, what I say about it is that our “intellect alone” way, has never been the way to have sustainability. You know, is it an accident that all these peoples who have such a broad spectrum of ways of knowing, their way of knowing includes ceremony, their way of knowing includes the song and the dance, their way of knowing includes seeking vision and seeking input from the larger community, the larger community of life, and also the spiritual community? You know, it was through opening all of those modalities that a human being has, and I'm gonna say, every human being has them. The question is, have they been cultivated have they been pointed out to us? But Indigenous peoples, you know, I'm going to say that having a broad spectrum of ways of knowing and sustainability go hand in hand for a human being. So it's not that I discount or dismiss the science entirely, I'm just saying that I don't believe that that can be the whole story. And part of the way I say that is, you know, try having a romance with intellect only, see how far you get, and see how enjoyable it is."
