Research group The Sympoietic Collaboratory (SPC) brings together researchers to diversify thinking about more-than-human flourishing. Working with divergent theories, materials, methods and matters of concern, we imagine what flourishing looks like and could be. We decentre the human and consider what might be at stake for non-humankind, and the futures that can be fermented through thoughtful 'making with', or sympoiesis, when the situated expertise and experiences of the world is valued.
Grounded in embodied and participatory research through design (pRtD), research at the Sympoietic Collaboratory orients towards more-than-human food systems in order to enliven Donna Haraway’s concept of staying with the trouble.
As Haraway explains:
We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response…. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places…. Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.
The Collaboratory works “to become capable of response” to the impacts of historical, contemporary, and imagined future food practices on world-making, what might be at stake and for whom, and how imaginaries matter.
We do this work on Sápmi Ubmeje – the unceded lands of the Sámi people – in the Swedish Arctic. Our researchers come from all over the world, are of diverse nationalities, genders and disciplinary orientations. This diversity is our strength.
Umeå Plant Science Centre, Forest Tree Genetics and Breeding
SLU Faculty of Forestry Science
SDU Dept of Business and Sustainability
SDU Dept. of Design, Media and Educational Science
Eindhoven University of Technology, Dept. of Industrial Design
OUH: Odense University Hospital SATCC – Surgical Research Unit with Karolinska Institute, Svendborg Hospital, and Uppsala University Hospital
