Making Kin: Resilience through Multispecies Care and Coexistence at NODE20

Kat was part of the Main Kin panel at NODE20 earlier this month. If you missed it, you can catch up by watching this recording of the session on Youtube: Making Kin: Resilience through Multispecies Care and Coexistence.

Info about Making Kin at NODE20

Both the pandemic and the climate crisis are lessons on human hubris—our failure to recognize planetary interdependencies and that we’re not above but a part of the biosphere. Ecofeminist icon Donna Haraway reminds us that “if we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming with, in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.” Building more resilient futures will require a new multispecies perspective that is grounded in kinship and connection. We need to challenge delusions of separation and open up the frames of what matters to us, in part by recognizing what matters to others. But how do we expand our circle of empathy? How do we develop hybrid, embodied, and multi-sensorial languages to communicate across species boundaries? And how can we engage and mobilize the general public around issues of multispecies care and coexistence?

This panel gathers a diverse group of artists, researchers, and activists – Kat Austen, Andrea Haenggi, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, Mary Maggic and Sukitoa o Namau. This panel is hosted and moderated by Anna Nowak, a German art historian and curator focused on transculturalism and biodiversity. The session will be streamed publicly for free following this link on the 7th of October from 21:00 until 22:30 (GMT+2).

The Embodiment Conference Panel: Embodied Ways of Knowing

Kat is participating at this year’s Embodiment Conference:

How do you recognise your friend in the street? How do I know how to ride a bike? How come some people have savoir-faire and others are clueless? How does intuition work? The short answer is embodied knowledge. Even though you’ve probably never heard of it, embodied knowledge underpins something like 95% of your thinking (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This Panel brings together Dr. K F Austen FRSA, Prof. Shogo Tanaka, Prof. Hui Wilcox and Dr. Adrian Harris to explore this fascinating topic.

October 23rd 3 pm at The Embodiment Conference. Watch the session live by following the link