Case Studies and Seminars: The Shape of a Practice
The week-long The Shape of a Practice event, which took place in October 2020, was a product of a diverse collection of case studies now presented here in one comprehensive archive. Over 100 contributors shared and discussed the materials from these case studies with fellow participants during the event in internal seminars, presentations, and exchanges with a public audience. In the seminars, the material was renegotiated through the guise of four research practices: archiving, sensing, communicating, and consensus building. This process entailed reflecting on the differences and commonalities between the methods and contexts of each case study which then fed the presentations and discussions that took place during the public program. Following the conclusion of the event, the participants reflected upon these exchanges, expanding and reshaping their case study materials for publication here on the Anthropocene Curriculum platform.
Read More- Case StudySpółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective
Krzak Inventory
The collective Spółdzielnia Krzak present the “tools-objects-friends” accumulated through their collective practice of community building in a Warsaw neighborhood.
Consensus Building, Ethics, Care, Knowledge transformation, Spatial, Habits, Species, Community
- Case StudyMichelle Lai, Huiying Ng
Re-earthing Through Collective Study
Geographer Huiying Ng and urban farmer Michelle Lai’s case study presents methods for intentionally unlearning conventional perspectives of landscape.
Sensing, Knowledge production, Ecology, Agriculture, Landscape, Human-environment relations
- Case StudyKatrin Hornek
A Landmass to Come
Combining archival research with sound and installation works, artist Katrin Hornek explores ways of “thinking with” and “feeling through” the Anthropocene.
Archiving, Metabolism, Human-environment relations, Commodities, Extraction, Archives
- Case StudyPietro Daniel Omodeo
Positioned Cosmology in Early Modernity
EarlyGeoPraxis is an ongoing research project on the transformative interplay of nature and culture in the historical water management of Venice, Italy.
Archiving, Cosmologies, Modernity, Infrastructure, History, Knowledge production, Archives
- Case StudyRavi Agarwal, Paulina Lopez
The Desert of the Anthropocene
Addressing themes of loss, modernization, and the political and natural effects of technology on traditional water systems in Rajasthan, India.
Consensus Building, Infrastructure, Water, Climate change, Landscape, Agriculture
- Case StudyCourtney Addison, Timothy Neale, Thao Phan
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements
What is elemental to this anthropogenic moment and what elemental forms are yet to emerge?
Communicating, Disciplinarity, Knowledge production, Toxicity, Speculative
- Case StudyShahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani
The Gadap Sessions
Part of the larger project Karachi LaJamia, this case study explores experiences creating non-hierarchical pedagogical curricula and spaces in Karachi, Pakistan.
Communicating, Education, Indigenous Rights, Landscape, Engagement, Degradation, Community
- Case StudyMyung Ae Choi, Buhm Soon Park
Technological DMZ
Research on one of the most important wintering places for cranes that happens to lie in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.
Case Study, Communicating, Ecology, Human-animal relations, Local knowledge, Species, Agriculture
- Case StudyGilly Karjevsky, Rosario Talevi
Climate Care
Climate Care festival engages with theory and practice at the intersection of climate challenges and ethics of care.
Communicating, Care, Climate change, Architecture, Ethics, Knowledge production, Urbanism, Sustainability
- Case StudyNikiwe Solomon, Adrian Van Wyk
(Re)Storying the Kuils River
Examining the impact of river management practices on local communities, this case study looks into the history and possible future of the Kuils River near Cape Town, South Africa.
Consensus Building, Landscape, Water, Settler Colonialism, Pollution, Local knowledge, Technosphere
- Case StudyEllie Irons, Maya Kóvskaya
Re-Patterning with Kudzu
Through encounters with kudzu (Pueraria montana), the notorious “vine that ate the South,” Ellie Irons tries to re-pattern the settler-colonial environmental imaginary.
Consensus Building, Field Work, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, Fieldstation, Mobility, Embodied research
- Case StudyImani Jacqueline Brown
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
Imani Jacqueline Brown’s project utilizes technologies of remote sensing to map the colonial and ecological violence of the fossil fuel industry.
Sensing, Violence, Environmental Justice, Extraction, Scale, Human-environment relations, Ecology
- Case StudyGrupo de Pesquisa em Ecologia das Práticas, Fernando Silva e Silva
There is Power in Coming Together Time and Again
Notes from the Grupo de Pesquisa em Ecologia das Práticas on the messy task of crafting common worlds in the Anthropocene.
Sensing, Epistemology, Knowledge production, Education, Community
- Case StudyMichael Swierz
When House on the Prairie Became Possibility Island
Ecologist Michael Swierz’s invitation to attune to our own physical embodiment as a focal point for responding to the Anthropocene.
Sensing, Wisdom, Resilience, Knowledge production, Future, Ecology
- Case StudyMargarida Mendes
Environmental Sensing
Margarida Mendes considers the relationships between the body, environment, and industry, and speculates on the sonic residue of toxicity in Mississippi’s petrochemical corridor.
Sensing, Toxicity, Water, Pollution, Ecology, Sound
- Case StudyHugo Almeida, Davide Scarso
Parallax Soundscape Campus
Exploring sonic culture beyond the limits of theoretical discussion, while acknowledging sound as a vital part of daily experience and scientific research.
Archiving, Field Work, Spatial, Time, Landscape, Sound, Soundwalk, Urban
- Case StudyEla Spalding
Suelo
Ela Spalding’s contribution to The Shape of a Practice looks back at the multidisciplinary residency Suelo, which took place in 2014 in coastal Panama.
Communicating, History, Ecology, Local knowledge, Network, Community
- Case StudyMoritz Roemer
Problematizing Heat
What is the impact of climate change on un-housed populations in Berlin? This case study connects the work by city mission projects to the wider problem of urban heat generation.
Communicating, Urbanism, Climate change, Human-environment relations, Care, Environmental Justice
- Case StudyStudents from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Open Space Planning, TU Berlin
Collaborative Mapping at Westhafen
Can a harbor offer “places of access” to the Anthropocene? This Berlin project sought to find out via methods of collaborative, playful entanglement.
Communicating, Mapping, Landscape, Infrastructure, Speculative, Education, Urban
- Case StudyMadhushree Kamak, Jahnavi Phalkey
Living Exhibitions
The Science Gallery in Bengaluru thinks of “living exhibitions” as exercises in creating public engagement around responsible stewardship of the planet.
Consensus Building, Engagement, Ecology, Ocean, Water, Education, Climate change, Biodiversity
- Case StudyStéphane Grumbach, Olivier Hamant
La Fabrique
How can universities have more impact when addressing global environmental crises? La Fabrique tries to rethink institutions, values, and utopias from the ground up.
Consensus Building, Climate change, Adaptation, Knowledge production, Knowledge transformation, Human-environment relations, Technosphere
- Case StudyJohan Gärdebo, Adam Wickberg
Environing Media and the Anthropocene
Charts and maps shape our understanding of the world but beyond this, how do data and representations actively form environments?
Sensing, History, Media
- Case StudyBabak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai
Labour Lung
Labour Lung is part of a series of work examining the handing over of our total biological and cognitive functions to capitalist technologies.
Sensing, Capitalism, Embodiment, History, Air, Sound
- Case StudyCharles T. Wolfe
Hierarchy of the Senses and Materialism of Touch
What misperceptions stem from the privileging of sight as “the noblest of the senses” in Western thinking?
Sensing, Modernity, Embodiment
- Case StudyJason Ludwig, Tim Schütz
Archiving the Anthropocene(s)
This project by researchers Jason Ludwig and Tim Schütz addresses the challenges of archiving the Anthropocene in its multitude of local contexts.
Archiving, Network, Local knowledge, Data, Environmental Justice
- Case StudyChristina Gruber
Reflections of the Past
Breeding and releasing sturgeons in the Danube River, biologists seek new ways to perceive what ecological conditions both the fish and the human need to prosper.
Sensing, Species, Biodiversity, Human-animal relations, Ecology, Sound
- Case StudyRaphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré
Sowing Somankidi Coura
An archival research and film project chronicling the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, founded in Senegal by returning migrant workers in 1977.
Sensing, Agriculture, Ecology, History, Migration, Colonialism, Community
- Case StudyJeremy Bolen
The Beam, the Air and the Speck
What could dust teach us if we listened to it? This project follows the interaction of dust particles with the species and landscapes of their environment.
Sensing, Sedimentation, Imaginary, Landscape, Air
- Case StudyJohannes Bruder, Orit Halpern, Karolina Sobecka
The Mont Pelerin Rewrite
This performative project focuses on rewriting and reinterpreting Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement to further discussion on alternative logics of acting collectively.
Consensus Building, Policy, Environmental Justice, History, Future, Inequality