CUHRE Research Workshop: Relational Ways of Knowing

August 22, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM  Location: OD SUN M0.60 Dialogen (V13-918a-0)

Particular ways of relating with more-than-human kin appear inexplicable and even impossible from an individualistic ontology. However, these epistemologies become normalized when understood from a deeply relational ontology. Often known as transrational knowledges, these epistemologies have been used by traditional human cultures past and present, and appear to be regularly experienced by children in Western education systems. These ways of knowing include intuitively navigating land, dreaming with more-than-humans, and intuitively communicating with animals and plants.

However, in Western-style education, these epistemologies tend to be overlooked, repressed, and belittled. By shaking up notions of time, space, and identity, this workshop explains the ontological shift that can enable these epistemologies. It also offers examples of intuitive interspecies communication at work in wildlife sanctuaries, veterinary care, land management practices, academic research, and climate crisis. Workshop participants will be invited to try out some deeply relational epistemologies for themselves and to consider how to support this form of cognitive diversity within their own classrooms and research.

Estella Carolye Kuchta teaches literature, composition, and research writing at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada. She is the coauthor with Sean Blenkinsop of Ecologizing Education: Nature-Centered Teaching for Cultural Change (Cornell, 2024). Her ecocritical research into Canadian love stories resulted in the novel Finding the Daydreamer (Elm Books, 2020). She has worked as a research assistant to Dr. Gabor Maté (MD), an editor for Susila Dharma International, and an intern for the CBC Radio, and is a long-time member of the International Love Research Network. Her doctoral research investigates the epistemological potential of love and includes research on transrational knowledges and fieldwork in intuitive interspecies communication. For two years, she lived off-grid on a mountaintop in California amidst madrones, cacti, bluejays, scorpions, and lizards, while raising her infant son.

For participation, please send an email to CUHRE Center Coordinator Dikte Reeh Andersen: Diktand@sam.sdu.dk