Interwoven Ecologies: Movement and Regeneration in a More-than-Human World

From New Hampshire’s Notches to the moors of England, the Arctic tundra, and beyond, this talk will root us in soil, moor, and stone as an invitation to inhabit and explore the alive-spaces at the intersection of ecological thinking, movement practice, and human and more-than-human worlds. Grounded in this place-based and practice-led methodology, the talk adopts a fluid approach to thinking about organizational structures and learning networks by leveraging the complexity and adaptability of more-than-human ecosystems to more traditionally disrupt sedimented disciplinary and institutional conventions.

Through a place-based lens, we will trace how diverse ecological identities and relationships inform movement practices, revealing how relational ontologies can provide a new paradigm for multispecies living-systems network design. Leveraging the complexity, interactivity, and adaptability of more-than-human ecosystems can generatively disrupt conventional disciplinary and institutional norms to foster an authentically regenerative approach to network and organizational design that promotes resilience, adaptability, co-creation, diversity and agency through place-based, practice-led methodologies.

Dr. Pavel Cenkl is Academic Dean at Prescott College and the Founder of the Regenerative Learning Network. His work focuses on the intersection of transformative learning, community and ecology and building a more regenerative and resilient educational future. Previously Head of Schumacher College (Devon, UK) and Dean of Sterling College (VT, US), Pavel writes and speaks widely about curriculum design and pedagogy, global learning networks, environmental humanities and philosophy and has developed programs in ecology, humanities, outdoor skills and recreation, regenerative food and farming, and more. Pavel’s books include Transformative Learning: Reflections on 30 Years of Head, Heart, and Hands at Schumacher College (with Satish Kumar, 2021); Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast (2010); and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784–1911 (2006). His current book project is titled Networked Learning: Transforming Higher Education through Distributed Learning.

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

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