The Call

International Call for Collaboration: Critical Forest Studies Collaboratory

Conveners: Dr David Rousell (RMIT), Professor Wendy Steele (RMIT), Dr Sarah Barns (RMIT), Dr Gideon Boadu (RMIT), Dr Samyia Ambreen (MMU), Dr Cher Hill (Simon Fraser), Professor Johan Siebers (Middlesex University)

You are invited to join an international Collaboratory for critical, transdisciplinary studies with forests and treescapes. The Collaboratory looks to seed new connections by bridging fields of research and practice in the environmental humanities, education, and social sciences; environmental arts, regenerative design, and urban planning; and environmental/earth system sciences. We are a vibrant interdisciplinary community with the shared aim of establishing ‘critical forest studies’ as a collective platform for cultivating:

1. new collaborations across the humanities, arts/design, social and natural sciences
2. new reciprocities with diverse stakeholders, institutions, and communities
3. new ways of sharing and circulating knowledge with diverse publics

Respectful and responsible engagements with Indigenous perspectives and knowledges are central to the work of the Collaboratory, as are questions of how intergenerational relations with forests produce and perpetuate different histories and futurities. Child, youth, and community framed practices of co-creation form a shared commitment to reciprocal exchange and collective experimentation for many members of the collective. The Collaboratory builds on recent participatory projects including Treescapes: Voices of the Futures (led by Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Local Alternatives (led by David Rousell, RMIT, Australia), Caring for Salmon Like Family (led by Cher Hill, Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Wild Hope: Conversations for a Planetary Commons (led by Wendy Steele, Naomi Stead, Fleur Watson, Katrina Simon, RMIT Australia). It aims to map and extend international connections emerging from critical ‘hotspots’ highlighted through these projects, including:

• Forests as sentient, interspecies learning communities (vegetal/animal/fungal/mineral)
• Forests as places of intergenerational knowledge creation, languaging, and storying
• Forests as places where different worlds, natures, cultures, politics, and sciences meet
• Forests as places of urban and regional regeneration, decay, repair, and reimagining
• Forests as sites of collective memory, trauma, history-making, and healing
• Forests as ecologies of sensation, technicity, temporality, and speculation

Germination Call: Please send us 1-2 images, a link, video and/or sound file (if you have one), and some writing (up to 500 words) that elaborates your work with forests as a relational practice. This work will be hosted on the Collaboratory web platform which we envision as a digital ‘planting’ of international examples. Please ensure that you have ethical consent for public sharing where necessary.

Wild Seeding: First Online Collaboratory gatherings (November 8th 2024): For our first event we will gather and share 5-minute seed talks about our work with forests in diverse places and communities. This initial gathering looks to ‘wild seed’ a relational community of practice and shared pathways into the second event.

Cultivating Relations: Futures Forum online seminar (November 27, 2024). For this event we invite Collaboratory members to record short videos (1-3 minutes) to share their critical forest practices with a wider public.

On Country day: Thinking with lyrebirds and ‘exclusion zones’ in the sentient forest (December 11, 2024). This in-person event will take place on Wurundjeri Country in the Dandenong ranges, Victoria, Australia. We invite members to host connected events in their own locations. Please let us know if you’d like to join this event, or organise your own!