With human and other-than-human materialities, we will explore the natureculture body methodology (Brisini, Simmons, Spry) as a means of creating ecokinship with the natural world (flora, fauna, earth, air, water, fire). The natureculture body is a sympoietic praxis with human and other-than-human ecomatters articulating who and how and what we are and can be as ecokin in the agentic natural world; it is a methodological response to Vicki Kirby’s question, “What if culture was really nature all along?” (214). Through the use of our bodies and/as writing, our collective intentions include: 

• Employing Berlant and Stewart’s writing process of “the hundreds,” as a method of fieldnoting natureculture body relations. As a writing form of one hundred words (give or take) “the project,” writes Berlant and Stewart, “pays attention to the relation of objects as movement and matter…throwing the world together, pulling the writer into contact with a slackening, a brightening, with physicality and potential” (Berlant & Stewart, 8, 11). Paradoxically, the mandate of one hundred words feels linguistically freeing while meandering the porous borders of plant-people consciousnesses, of molecular communique. Nimble and toiling, wild and restrained, the hundreds form offers a method of natureculture exploration and writing. 

• Using movement in whatever form or function our bodies allow to explore and embody the relationship of matterphor (Spry), the confluence of materialities/discourse/language. 

For the workshop please bring: 

1. Object from nature (anything: stone, soil, leaf, branch, shell, etc.) that is in some way meaningful. 
2. Ajournal or some form of paper and pencil/pen/etc. for writing and sketching. 
3. Comfortable cloths for movement in whatever form our bodies allow. 

I am SO looking forward to fieldnoting with you the complexities, the frissions, the speculative fabulations of material kinship.

WORKS CITED 

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds. Duke UP, 2019. 

Brisini, Travis, Jake Simmons, Tami Spry. Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance. Routledge, 2024 (forthcoming). 

Kirby, Vicki. “Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along?” Material Feminisms. Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 214-236. 

Spry, Tami. “Performative Autoethnography: A Matterphor of Things.” Research Methods in Performance Studies. Edited by Craig Gingrich-Philbrook and Jake Simmons, Routledge, 2023, pp. 135–153.