#relationality — Public Fediverse posts

Conservation
Fast-track development
Relationality

* "Despite the broad acclaim these legal personhood models have received, New Zealand’s government is unravelling protections for the environment. It has disestablished the Ministry for the Environment, attempted to weaken environmental protections in fisheries laws, and plans to reform the Resource Management Act to enable more widespread “fast-track” development." >>
https://theconversation.com/nzs-overhaul-of-nature-protection-laws-is-a-chance-to-move-away-from-fortress-conservation-286647

* United Kingdom’s Rights of Nature Bill which passed its second reading in parliament. Rights of nature raise questions about the ethical basis of environmental protection and the implications of extending rights beyond humans.
https://post.parliament.uk/rights-of-nature-ethical-frameworks/

#conservation #fasttrack #extractivism #EuropeanColonisation #WaterLaws #rivers #relationality #IndigenousPeoples #ethics #RightsOfNature #environment

New publication: Our joint paper on #Relationality in the #PhilosophyOfTechnology just came out (w/ Bas de Boer, Anna Puzio, and Jan Peter Bergen): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-026-10040-9 #philosophy #OpenAccess #NewMaterialism #Postphenomenology #ANT

»the world is not to be learned and thrown aside«
Dewey, Art as Experience, Ch 13

#Art #pragmatism #relationality

What the gift economy, the mycorrhizal network, the watershed, and the migratory bird have in common is that none of them ever mistook themselves for separate — and the experiment the Lifeboat Academy asks us to live is, at its root, the same one: to stop mistaking ourselves for separate, and feel what's already holding us.

This week's reflection: https://emotus.substack.com/p/daily-reflection-2025-05-21

#GwendolynBrooks #LifeboatAcademy #Relationality #LivingSystems #StayHuman

#Reciprocity, #Respect, #Relationality: Three Rs to Understand #IndigenousPerspectives on Development in the #Green conomy

By Edson Krenak, May 27, 2026

"Reciprocity is more than a practice; it is our way of life, the way of life. Instead of focusing solely on economic growth, without limit, we must pay attention to check whether all beings are enjoying life in a healthy place. Without reciprocity, the green economy will reproduce the same extractive logic it claims to overcome, and eventually fail our common home, Earth."

Read more:
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/reciprocity-respect-relationality-three-rs-understand-indigenous-perspectives-development

#IndigenousPeoples #Greenwashing #UncheckedGrowth #Capitalism #Colonialism #ExtractiveIndustries #LoveYourMotherEarth

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

Our new publication! #multispecies #urban #relationality Andersson, E., Enqvist, J., Tengö, M. & Aaltonen, V. A., (2026). Transforming the nature of cities - stewardship and more-than-human agency. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 80:101628. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

"At a time when the superstructures of modern civilization seem terminally messed up, the authors of '#Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human' argue that we must start a new conversation about the nature of being and modern myths of the self. Anthropologist #ArturoEscobar, cultural studies scholar #MichalOsterweil, and biologist #KritiSharma draw on a diversity of sources – evolutionary science, cultural studies, art and poetry, Indigenous practices, wisdom traditions, and more – to explain the deep #interdependence of all living beings: a perspective can help us develop a new political economy and culture."
https://pca.st/twslaew4

New paradigm-shifting paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @PNASNews that lays out the foundations for a relational biodiversity economics:

"Toward a relational biodiversity economics: Embedding
plural values for sustainability transformation"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2314586122

#relationality
#ecologicaleconomics
#sustainability
#nature
#biodiversity
#values

The most common use of LLMs in 2025 is therapy/companionship

The result should be treated with a bit of caution, as a content analysis of forums and online articles, but an important finding nonetheless. It’s striking how this development features almost nowhere in debates about LLM use by students within higher education!

It suggests to me that LLMs are rapidly diffusing as a reflexive technology and that we urgently need to understand how to distinguish between harmful and helpful uses, in order to steer users in one direction rather than the other.

In general there’s an urgent need at this stage to crack open the black box of practice in order to identify relational modes of engagement, rather than treating singular practices (in effect thematic generalisations) as the organising principle for understanding real world LLM use.

See also Sam Altman saying that young people don’t make a decision without asking ChatGPT what to do, claiming the memory feature enables a context to emerge across their life and all the people in it:

https://youtu.be/ctcMA6chfDY?si=_eJgeG1I4qfix0Hy&t=924

He goes on to say (17 mins) that the single sign in which OpenAI are launching will be a basis to enable this personalisation to follow a user around the internet. The context accumulated through ChatGPT will in effect follow you around the internet.

#AI #companionship #LLMs #relationality #therapy

Suffering as a Common Ground for Philosophizing
Research Talk with Rolf Elberfeld

During this engaged academic exchange, participants critically explored Elberfeld’s innovative approach to philosophizing, emphasizing suffering as a commonly shared, relational phenomenon rather than an abstract, epistemic notion.

Read a summary of the discussion here:
https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/glophi/2025/05/14/suffering-as-a-common-ground-for-philosophizing-with-rolf-elberfeld/

#africanphilosophy #intercultural #phenomenology, #relationality #suffering #vulnerability #philosophy

New article on how relational, decolonial & feminist approaches can inform the EU's @EUCommission Bioeconomy approach. @JustSaba, Jacopo Giuntoli, Tom Oliver & I identify the main roots for injustice & extractivism & provide a list of action pointson how to co create the bioeconomy on ethics of care, relationality & socioecological justice

#EU #Bioeconomy #Degrowth #Relationality #Care #Justice #decolonization #Feminism

https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11625-024-01613-3

"Harmony in this context is not about uniformity. The true transformative potential of #harmony can be realized by embracing the tensions inherent in #plurality."

Man Fang, Post Growth Fellow, explores how #Chinese #philosophy can complement current approaches to rethinking progress: https://medium.com/postgrowth/rediscovering-harmony-how-chinese-philosophy-offers-pathways-to-a-regenerative-future-07a097b237a0?source=friends_link&sk=421799945cafb5f700d196cfabfe3306

#wellbeing #postgrowth #culture #sustainability #connection #narrative #environment #emotion #conflict #relationality #power #psychology #governance #research #policy #china #germany

Culturally modified trees in New South Wales

"In NSW, scarred, marked and ring trees are protected under the National Parks and Wildlife Act, but trees-in-trees are not recognised as "culturally modified trees". Trees-in-trees" are tree species growing out of another tree species, often with stone-axe cut marks visible around the guest tree's graft. All trees have an identity, they have roles and responsibilities in the family unit, like people...They have their own spirit, like people...What makes them unusual is that neither species is an epiphyte: the type of plant that grows on another plant but is sustained by airborne nutrients...These are living cultural memory embodied in trees. All over Australia, trees have been modified by Aboriginal people but are vanishing due to logging, agricultural expansion and urban sprawl. Land clearing is a really big concern."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-09/culturally-modified-trees-a-national-treasure-in-outback-nsw/104557536

Culturally modified trees by settler society:
Trees are regularly butchered to make way for power lines.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-07/tree-canopy-cover-urban-heat-island/104567914
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/pruning-street-trees-around-powerlines-ausgrid-compromise/101538168
#trees #FirstNationsPeoples #water #NSW #entanglement #relationality #IntraAction #IndigenousKnowledge #SettlerSociety #culture #sprawl #logging #energy #PowerLines

I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention‘ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping us escape from the panicked banalities of the digital distraction debate, by reconstructing the existential stakes which tend to get lost amidst the moral panic. I couldn’t agree more with this, nor could I express it with the clarity he does:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

But increasingly I’d insist on recognising their psychic foundations. Recognising the moral force of attention is preciously, particularly when it helps us recognise the existential stakes of our daily habits and the choices we make (or fail to make) in relation to them. But I find the implicit ontology of the person underpinning these accounts increasingly implausible, at least in the sense of lacking an adequate account of the psychic foundations of moral attention. There’s so much to explore here but, as one suggest, we could connect the argument Sacasas makes to the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald, which I summarise here from an earlier blog post:

Loewald was concerned with the possibility of “deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire” (quoted on pg 181). This leads to “an adult reality that has been wholly separated from infantile fantasy” existing in “a desiccated, meaningless, passionless world” (pg 194). This conceives of language as the “life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality” (pg 181). Following Heidegger Loewald sees language in terms of what Taylor calls world-disclosure, with the capacity to “generate and link domains of experience” (pg 185). The quality of this link is the “difference between a present that is haunted by the past and a present that is enriched by the past” (pg 194).

For Loewald we need “links to the affective density of the unconscious, without which ‘human life becomes sterile and an empty shell’” (pg 195). He conceives of transference as a resource for change in this respect, rather than an obstacle to analysis; in transference there is a “revitalization, a relinking of the past and the present, fantasy and reality, primary process and secondary process” (pg 195). To talk of ghosts becoming ancestors isn’t just a matter of making peace with the past, it’s working with the power of the past to enrich the present, as Mitchell quotes Loewald on pg 194:

In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.

Such a ghost is, as Mitchell describes it, “a piece of the past filled with passionate intensity, that was split off, through repression, from her present experience” (pg 197). Repression for Loewald is a failure of this link, a rigidity in differentiation which collapses the space in which resonance is possible.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/01/27/making-ghosts-into-ancestors/

This opens up the possibility of a subtle relationality in which the integration of our past experience (or lackthereof) shapes how we relate to present external experience. The richness and the vibrancy, the “sheer entertainment value” of the world’s “views, sounds, and smells” to use Arendt’s phrase, only shows up for us through the integration of the past experience into the present reality. I think this fits well with the argument Sacasas is making and opens up an additional horizon through which we can understand our propensity to get caught in deadening loops:

Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

The risk is that without this we lapse into a moral athleticism, in which only those who have cultivated themselves (with the time, energy, cultural resources and confidence to do so) can really experience the incipient beauty which can be found in each moment. There might be some truth to this as an empirical generalisation which we need to grapple with, but introducing the psychic dimension complicates the analysis so it’s no longer a matter of cultivation vs habituation. Overcoming that dichotomy opens up a very interesting sociotechnical & existential terrain to explore.

Claude Opus has questions 🧐

• How might we cultivate practices and design environments (both technological and physical) that support the kind of patient, invitational attention Sacasas describes? What individual and collective habits could help keep us vitally linked to the “affective density of the unconscious”?
• In an age of pervasive digital mediation, how do we balance the benefits of new connective technologies with the need to preserve space for unstructured, open-ended engagement with the world and with our own interiority?
• What role might practices like psychoanalysis, meditation, artistic creation, and immersion in nature play in re-enchanting our experience and rekindling the “passionate intensity” of the past in the present moment?
• How can we democratize access to the time, space, and resources needed for cultivating enchantment, so that it doesn’t become an elite pursuit? What social and political changes might be necessary to make this possible?
• What new language and conceptual frameworks do we need to articulate the existential stakes of attention in a hypermediated age? How can we translate these often abstract-sounding ideas into compelling visions and practical agendas for change?

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/29/the-moral-force-of-attention-and-their-psychic-foundations/

#arendt #attention #distraction #HansLoewald #integration #LMSacasas #psychoanalysis #relationality #trauma

From Being Human in a Virtual Society: A Relational Approach by Pierpaolo Donati loc 339:

The basic sociological problem, faced with the advent of new technologies, is not whether or not it will be possible to build AIs and robots capable of emulating the human mind entirely or largely, this is not my problem. The sociological problem is how new technologies change human life to the extent that, by changing knowledge and communication, they modify the human person and her relational life.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/01/the-basic-sociological-problem-of-artificial-intelligence/

#artificialIntelligence #donati #relationality

If you want some top tier* bird song analysis check out this post about chickadees and music theory.

https://freeanduneasy.blog/song-of-the-chickadees/

#MusicTheory #Music #Birding #relationality #SystemsThinking

*most definitely just a middle tier at best

I'm thinking about what Tyson Yunkaporta said in #SandTalk, that knowledge is about relationships and processes, not content. This is difficult to do, and I'm not quite sure how to go about this. But I don't want to just learn what things are, I want to know them, to be related to them.

#process #relationality #SystemsThinking

I'm excited to announce the #cfp for On Relationalities: Politics, Narrative, Sociality, a one-day hybrid symposium to be hosted by the University of Brighton on Wed 5 April 2023, featuring a keynote by Dr Leticia Sabsay (LSE). Details in this thread! #symposium #conference #relationality #sociality #philosophy #PoliticalPhilosophy #CriticalTheory #QueerTheory #decolonial #BlackStudies #Sociology #RadicalPolitics #LeticiaSabsay #sabsay #UniversityOfBrighton #CAPPE @philosophy @decolonial

Very cool: Animals are key to restoring the world's forests, long-term data set reveals

Our tendency to be literal, concrete and thing-focused is boundless. In response the world keeps trying to show us, it’s *relations* all the way down.

#ecology #restoration #forests #regeneration #relationality

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-animals-key-world-forests-long-term.html

#introduction

I'm a PhD candidate in educational policy studies at #UAlberta. My interest is in #childhood and the politics of #education. I'm especially interested in the #temporality of childhood and temporal #relationality. My dissertation specifically looks at education law and policy in Alberta beginning with Inspiring Education in 2008 and how childhood is instrumentalized in political discourses of education while #children in their present selves are largely absent from policy itself.