In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures," but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts.
At Future Natures, an important focus is what it feels like to experience our crisis-wracked modern life, especially enclosures, and to illuminate the inner and social satisfactions of commoning. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like? What experiences and emotions are necessary for social collaboration and solidarity? How can such subjectivities be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?
To learn more about the brave scholarly experimentation going on at Future Natures, I spoke with Amber Huff on the latest episode of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #59).
“Storytelling is really the universal in human experience,” said Huff, noting that even anthropologists, biologists and other academics, as they study the world, are in the business of creating narratives. “We thought storytelling might make a really good anchor for a transdisciplinary approach that focuses on breaking down hierarchies of expertise [in the academy], and communicating stories in accessible ways,” Huff explained.
Instead of putting out calls for purely academic contributions, for example, Future Natures invites people to contribute videos, photographs, oral histories, and podcasts. One of its more courageous ventures has been to publish comic books to explain unfamiliar topics. One introduces readers to the commons in a comic book form, for example.
Another explains capitalist value-creation, and yet another shows how the behavior of fungi can help map radical alternative futures.
While traditionalists might regard many of these gambits as not rigorous or amenable to peer review, Huff hastens to point out that “the challenges that we face today are multifaceted and multidimensional. They're experienced in different ways by different groups of people, depending on history, social positions, situated environmental relationships, what your livelihoods are, what your educational prospects are, what your skill set is.”
Storytelling is a way to make other people’s perspectives – especially those of historically marginalized people – more visible, and to validate them. In this sense, storytelling can achieve a shift of power in how we choose to understand the world, stepping away somewhat from traditional academic forms of storytelling and amplifying the voices of people not usually heard.
Popular genres like comics and film have enduring appeal, said Huff, because in today’s chaotic times, they help us make sense of a world that is increasing abnormal, if not utterly weird. Huff asks: “Why is it that ‘the weird’ might seem so resonant right now?” She attributes a lot of our disorientation to our shared, mass experiences of the COVID pandemic, extreme, algorithm-driven speech on social media, and angry political movements, all of which call into question our usual criteria for making sense of the world. Traditional boundaries are being breached, and new normals are being declared.
In the face of this cultural disruption, Huff believes that it’s important to motivate and mobilize people to tell their stories – and that using genres of popular culture invites people into familiar, emotionally resonant storytelling forms. Comics, novels, films, and podcasts “have been part of our lives as ways that we situate ourselves in the world, through the art that we consume,” said Huff.
One popular genre that Future Natures has explored is what Huff calls “weird ecology,” along with its relationship to the commons. One podcast episode explores the idea of folk horror stories associated with English commons, for example. A film excavates historical stories about ghosts in Grovely Wood, a former Norman hunting ground in southern England.
What do these sorts of stories have to contribute to our modern situation? Future Natures explains: “The way many of us experience the effects of rapid globalization is that it has unsettled our ordinary perceptions of time, space, ecology, causality, and agency." Through ‘weird ecology’, “radical ecology meets weird fiction. Exploring weird ecology can help us to question our assumptions about what is ‘natural’, how ‘nature’ should behave, and the relationships or distinctions between humans and other creatures….Weird ecologies are not static geographies, but rather active spaces of encounter, participation and transformation.”
In looking at storytelling conventions to probe ‘the weird,’ Huff talked about the collaboration between Future Natures and a group called Sea Change. The group is perhaps best known for producing the film My Octopus Teacher. The film – about a burned-out scientist’s unexpected friendship with an octopus who lived near his coastal cottage – proved to be a hugely popular story in theaters and streaming services worldwide. It seemed to speak to the social alienation from other living creatures that so many people feel these days.
Huff’s account of the film provoked me to propose that Future Nature is offering f “social therapy with scholarly bite.” That may be a reductive phrase, but it is certainly part of the hybrid innovations in academic storytelling, and engagement with the modern world and commoning, that Future Natures is all about.
You can listen to my full interview with Amber Huff here.
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