Braid & Flow is an experimental collaborative seminar organized by the Pedagogies group of the Anthropocene Commons. It was initially devised by a clever group of activists and artists in the US Gulf South during the pandemic, and has a complex and inclusive format that lends itself to building critical discussions and creative insight. Each seminar is centered around a theme that could resonate with any discipline, but is outside of any one field’s purview. Three presenters from disparate lines of engagement are invited to explore how the theme reverberates with an aspect of their work. For our first Braid & Flow session in July 2024, we explored RIVERS as a theme through the work of poet Stephanie Niu, media scholar/artist John Kim, and geographer Simon Turner. And last September, we grappled with the idea of BETRAYAL as a subtheme of the anthropocene with sociologist Zach Schrank, earth system scientist Francine McCarthy, and urban ecologist Florian Ruhland.
Braid & Flow seminars take place online. They are organized to stimulate unpredictable correspondences and to foster exchange among the participants. The process begins with convening a session and introducing the theme, which each of three presenters address in a one-minute summary. After introductions, a breakout room is created for each presenter to give a longer presentation. The audience members have to decide which talk they’d most like to hear and follow the presenter into a breakout room. Presenters then speak to these smaller groups. It is like a three-ring circus, or better yet, like three channels playing at once. The channel metaphor is a good one, as braid and flow is inspired by how river channels, over time, separate and then come together to mix their waters. After about 20 minutes, everyone re-enters the common room hear summaries of the three presentations, and to attempt to make sense of them together.
creative response to betrayal by Marianna Tsionki
This part of the session becomes a group reflection on how the different channels correspond and weave together, or move in different ways. The conversations are often daring and exhilarating. In our recent session on betrayal, Francine McCarthy and Florian Ruland led us to consider how their respective disciplines, geology, and ecology, have betrayed their practitioners in a time when the disciplinary doorkeepers are increasingly beholden to economic interests. In Florian Ruland’s example, this is partially due to a capture by language that occurs when ecological concerns are translated for use by policy makers, leading subsequently to a weakening of the importance and leverage of the ecological facts. Francine McCarthy discussed the significance of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s (ICS) rejection of the evidence gathered by the Anthropocene Working Group to accept the Anthropocen as a new unit on the geological time scale. In so doing, the ICS seemed to embrace the present geological time scale as sacrosanct, betraying the liveliness of geological research and scientific method itself. Zach Shrank’s talk addressed the theme of betrayal through a sub-theme of distraction. Shrank explores ways the anthropocene might be made legible – visible to people. He points out that there are “layers of distraction that make it hard for us to fully recognize, interpret, and make sense of it;” that have to do with the limits of representation.
Braid & Flow is organized into two 1-hour sessions that take place on two different days. In the second session, participants get a creative prompt that is informed by discussions from the first session. After going offline to create responses, everyone gathers together again to present their findings and interpretations- in text, drawings, photographs, collages from, and whatever means possible.
