Arts, Humanities, and Sciences: Emergent, Necessary Unities for Thinking and Dwelling as Humans-Being-on-Earth with David Syring

The Oika collaboration at the Museum of the White Mountains, led by Rich Blundell, Rita Leduc, and the Hubbard Brook Forest, represents an exciting shift in understanding ecological realities. In this collaboration Rich, Rita, and the Forest exceed usual approaches to “art-sci” work. Science, art, and being interweave to create an expansive, lively sense of each collaborator as agents in an endeavor of cosmic understanding. This work aligns with an emergent opening up of inquiry related to ecological knowledge.

This presentation and discussion will engage with the exhibit and offer insights from David’s research at Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites where he has spoken with scientists, artists, writers, and thinkers from a variety of disciplines.

Collaboration between scientists, humanities scholars, social scientists, artists, and others simultaneously challenge and potentially reinforce conventional boundaries between scientific research and other ways of knowing. In his 2004 book, Cross-pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry, ecologist and writer Gary Nabhan argues that blending approaches creates better knowledge; insights arise when research opens to diverse ways of asking questions and learning answers.

Environmental science has moved towards more holistic engagements with the arts, humanities, and the social sciences; however, much of this work has seemed something like science accepting other ways of knowing simply to help “tell the stories” or visualize the findings of science. In essence, the model points to asking disciplines other than science to popularize or publicize scientific findings.

The exhibit at the Museum steps aside from this approach and offers an opportunity to think and be otherwise. Artists, humanities scholars, social scientists and others should not only be brought in at the end of projects to tell the story. We have questions, methods, and practices that enlarge knowing in crucial ways that humans need in order to be-in-the world, including at this difficult time of cultural and ecological challenges and climate change.

David Syring, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Duluth, writes about cultures of place, the arts, plants and animals in human cultures, food systems, and sustainability. Places in the World a Person Could Walk was a Minnesota Book Award finalist. Since 2005 he has done frequent fieldwork in Ecuador, leading to With the Saraguros: The Blended Life in a Transnational World. He creates videos with Saraguro collaborators. For five years he edited Anthropology and Humanism, and he wrote an overview of humanistic anthropology for the SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology. He is co-editor (with Lauren Miller) of The Routledge Companion to the Anthropology of Performance (2023). He co-founded (with Mitra Emad) the Participatory Media Lab at UMD, which serves as a collaborative space for faculty and students exploring the techniques of critically informed, digitally enhanced social research. Faculty empower students to bring critical thinking and technology skills to the larger community by creating integrated experiences on such topics as regional food systems, arts and community, ethnic identity and diversity in urban environments, water resource issues, interpreting the final statements of death row inmates and more.

During a sabbatical year research project in 2022-23, David has been looking at how Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites integrate arts and humanities inquiry into their work, as well as how LTERs engage Indigenous knowledges and communities.

This event is supported by a National Endowment of the Humanities’ Spotlight on the Humanities grant for Plymouth State University’s Sustainability Studies program.

This is a hybrid event. To receive the Zoom link, please register HERE.