Lucier and the Migratory Potentials of Sound
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations. Since the mid-1960s, Lucier has been a pioneering force in music and sound art, whether working with a brainwave-activated percussion orchestra, traditional chamber ensembles or the migratory potential of recorded environments. Lucier's thoughtful and poetic work often engages with the ‘natural’ world and cuts across many disciplinary boundaries. In October 2009 he spoke to a class of geographers studying concepts of ‘nature’. The talk and transcript are available in the Transnational Ecologies Audio Archive.
Alvin Lucier, Wesleyan University. "Experiments in Sound." October 2009, Kingston, ON.
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Lucier and the Migratory Potentials of Sound
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations. Since the mid-1960s, Lucier has been a pioneering force in music and sound art, whether working with a brainwave-activated percussion orchestra, traditional chamber ensembles or the migratory potential of recorded environments. Lucier's thoughtful and poetic work often engages with the ‘natural’ world and cuts across many disciplinary boundaries. In October 2009 he spoke to a class of geographers studying concepts of ‘nature’. The talk and transcript are available in the Transnational Ecologies Audio Archive.
Alvin Lucier, Wesleyan University. "Experiments in Sound." October 2009, Kingston, ON.
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Animals and Animality Across the Humanities and Social Sciences: Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, June 26-27, 2010
Queen's University: Keynote: Carol Adams
The emergent field of animal and animality studies is rapidly being articulated across scholarly boundaries. We invite graduate students to enter this growing conversation and approach the topic from perspectives reflecting the broad (inter)disciplinarity of this field. Discussions will use critical animal studies as a conceptual lens in order to investigate issues including the boundaries between self and Other, agency and biological drive, and reason and non-reason; the codes that permeate our conceptions of non-human animals; and the implications of troubling and/or making porous the human/animal divide. Is understanding human beings as embodied subjects ontologically bound to our relationship to non-human animals? In what ways is animal wellbeing crucially implicated in how we think ourselves into and against animals? As part of these discussions, we welcome investigations into the ways that (as Val Plumwood contends) animals, nature, and racial, colonial, and gendered Others function, now and historically, as overlapping sites of difference. We also invite considerations of the relationship between the conceptual economy that posits animality as an exploitable trope and forms of Othering that render animals as salable things. In approaching these topics, we encourage participants to consider how animal and animality studies has impacted other theoretical lenses, including critical race theory and feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical/environmental studies, as well as the attendant politics of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the field.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
Thinking with animals / intro-species boundary disruption
Becoming animals and biocentric ethics
The boundary between domestic and wild, sentiment and terror
Making animals 'matter' and the role of affect
Animal poetry and ecopoetics
Animals and the nation in the nineteenth century and beyond
Animals and spectacle (both alive and dead)
Urban and wild animals and the politics of space
Animal geographies and environmental histories
Animals and transnational ecologies
Speciesm and racism
Animals and desire / animality and sexuality
Vegetarianism and the politics of meat
Animals in language / symbolic animals
The discourses and iconography of animals in various cultural forms
The uses of animals in war and torture
Animal studies now and its future directions
The deadline for submissions (October 1st) has passed but do contact conference organizers if you would like to attend: jaime.j.s.denike@queensu.ca.
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Transnational Discussions at NiCHE Northern Workshop
Between June 11 and 15, a group of students, faculty, and northern community members gathered under the midnight sun to consider the intersections of northern and environmental history. Organized by Liza Piper (University of Alberta), Brad Martin (Northwestern University), David Neufeld (Parks Canada), and myself, the workshop drew participants from across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to discuss northern research from within the North itself. For three days we discussed northern histories, geographies, and cultures and considered how colonization, militarization, exploration, science, and resource extraction have shaped the North before heading out in canoes to paddle the Yukon River, hike the Carcross Dunes, and visit the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. The weekend was capped off by a stimulating keynote public address by Tina Loo that drew together some of the themes of the workshop.
The group at Helen’s Fish Camp, photo by Dave Neufeld
With the support of the Transnational Ecologies Project I organized a panel to speak to some of the transnational elements of northern environmental history and geography. The panel, “Indigenous Relations: Past, Present, and Future”, focused attention on the relations between northern Indigenous peoples and between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Millie Kuliktana (Kugluktuk, NU) was unable to attend but her involvement in organizing a gathering of Inuit and Dene in Kugluktuk in 2008 was described in a video documenting the event. George Mackenzie, Grand Chief of the Tli Cho Nation (Behchokö, NT) also shared his thoughts on this transnational gathering, as well as the importance of the land to young people and what culture means to the Tli Cho government. I presented aspects of my research into how the Bloody Falls massacre story has shaped relations between Inuit and Dene, and how the gathering in Kugluktuk represented a purposeful departure from colonial histories of conflict towards a shared future, defined by Indigenous peoples for themselves. Frank Tester (University of British Columbia) pointed to the central importance of capitalism in defining relations between Inuit and the state. His study of housing in Inuit communities, which he described as one of the biggest public health scandals in Canadian history, highlighted the ways in which capital defines relations both within and between nations.
Frank Tester, photo by Dave Neufeld
In addition to the panel discussions, workshop participants considered broader questions shaping their work in history, geography, anthropology, social work, science studies, environmental studies, and Indigenous self-government. Liza Piper led a discussion about the importance of place in northern environmental history and the ways in which specific places in the North are implicated in North-South, circumpolar, and international frameworks. The production of the North as a distinct region inevitably raises questions about transnational ecological, political, and cultural geographies, as well as the legacy of colonial understandings of ‘North’. While sharing a meal at Helen’s Fish Camp, Ta’an Kwach’an Elder Frances Woolsey welcomed participants to Ta’an Kwach’an traditional territory and shared her stories about growing up, raising children, and working in the Yukon. Her stories spoke to the personal and cultural articulations of militarization, colonialism, and resource extraction as well as the deeply storied land upon which the workshop was held. As we paddled the Yukon River among eagles, beavers, and cliff swallows, past subdivisions and sewage outflows, and among the remains of telegraph lines and the fresh green of cranberry bushes, the importance of holding northern workshops in the North was apparent.
Canoeing the Yukon River, photo by Dave Neufeld
A big thanks to all our sponsors (NiCHE, Parks Canada, and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute) and to the workshop participants for a memorable and thought-provoking weekend. Links to the workshop schedule, participant information, the post-workshop blog and additional photos can be found on the workshop webpage.
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Transnational Citizen Science: An Interview with Lilly Briggs, Coordinator of BirdSleuth Costa Rica
Interview by Kirsten Greer.
Lilly Briggs is a graduate student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, with an area of concentration in the conservation of neotropical migratory songbirds. She also helped coordinate BirdSleuth Costa Rica, an environmental pilot project designed to engage children and youth in bird conservation. As Transnational Ecologies is working with Costa Rica’s Centro de Apprendizaje para la Conservacion de Sarapiqui (Sarapiqui Conservation Learning Centre) to develop shared environmental history curriculum, we look forward to drawing from Lilly’s expertise. Kirsten Greer interviewed Lilly recently about her travels and her encounters with birds and education.
Lilly's passion for birds started when she was nine years old in the small town of Chelsea, Quebec. Lilly had already lived in different parts of Asia before settling in the countryside near Ottawa, where her father worked for Foreign Affairs. Perhaps her transient life allowed her to be more attuned to the migratory nature of birds, traveling from one place to the next.
Her father was a keen birdwatcher and set up several bird feeders at her family home. Lilly loved watching the numerous visitors to her house, which included grosbeaks, sparrows, and chickadees. The gregarious Blue Jay emerged as her favourite bird that frequented regularly her birdfeeders, garnering her the nickname "Blue Jay".
Lilly decided to attend Dalhousie University for her undergraduate degree. After graduating, she worked at the Falls Brook Centre in rural New Brunswick, where she reacquainted herself with the birds of her childhood, and realized the importance of bird conservation. She decided to pursue a career in environmental studies and applied to the Masters of Environmental Studies program at York University. Sparked by Dr. Bridget Stutchbury's influential book Silence of the Songbirds, songbirds emerged as her primary research interest.
At York University, Lilly completed courses in ornithology, and worked with Dr. Eugene Morton on the Blue-Headed Vireo in Pennsylvania. For her MES, she decided to pursue a practical project that contributed directly to bird conservation. Upon learning about the BirdSleuth curriculum, designed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, Lilly identified a missing link in the North American program: education in bird conservation along the birds’ migratory routes such as in Latin America. BirdSleuth is a supplementary science curriculum focused on fostering curiosity about birds while collecting data for one of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Citizen Science Projects.
This is how Lilly came up with the pilot project BirdSleuth Costa Rica. In partnership with the Lab, as well as La Selva Biological Station in northern Costa Rica, Lilly modified the existing BirdSleuth modules to include the local avifauna. Lilly says that citizen science is a great way to make people feel hands-on about conservation, and an opportunity to let people, even children, see their contributions in action. With BirdSleuth, children and youth learn about the different species of birds and about scientific concepts, such as population monitoring, animal behaviour, and ecology.
In order to adapt the Birdsleuth program for Costa Rica, Lilly had to condense the program down from six to four lessons for the purpose of the field test. She also had to translate all bird names into Spanish for the schools. She helped students submit their bird observation data to eBird, an online database used by scientists to learn about bird populations and distribution.
Lilly enjoyed seeing some of the students become excited when they observed bird species learned in the class room. As she puts it, it was “curriculum put in action”. Students often shared their knowledge of birds and installed bird feeders at their homes.
The Birdsleuth initiative in Costa Rica has illustrated how particular programs developed in North America need to be adapted to local contexts. Lilly learned that most of the Spanish bird names she had studied (and put into the curriculum) were not used in this particular region. The local names for birds were assigned mainly to the most visible ones or ones with very definitive features. More importantly, one name could apply to a whole group of similar looking birds.
However, what surprised Lilly the most was how birds were often taken for granted in a place that is viewed as a leader in ecotourism and conservation. Part of the explanation could be linked to the socio-economic conditions of the region where she worked, which was very rural and one of the poorest areas of Costa Rica. Most schools did not have computers to contribute to the eBird database, and could therefore not see their contributions in action. Furthermore, the migratory birds she observed in Canada were, although present, not as visible in Costa Rica, except for the Turkey Vulture. This made it harder to link the transient lives of birds from Canada to Costa Rica.
Lilly says that if she has an opportunity to run Bird Sleuth Costa Rica again, she would modify her approach to the project. For example, one teacher in particular made helpful changes to the modules, which she would implement. Another alteration would be to provide a variety of visual tools to illustrate the migratory behaviour of birds, showing photos or video of birds in American and Canadian landscapes. This would help the children see the different habitats and along the bird's journey. Finally, Lilly would like to incorporate more tangible activities to make the project more accessible to the students.
This summer Lilly is hoping to continue the BirdSleuth program in Costa Rica, pending funding. What started as a childhood interest in birds has now morphed into a lifelong pursuit for the conservation of birds at a transnational scale. If you have any questions about Birdsleuth or would like to become involved in the project, please feel free to contact Lilly at lbriggs@yorku.ca. Lilly is also a member of the NiCHE's Transnational Ecologies Project.
Websites
- BirdSleuth: Cornell Lab of Ornithology: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/birdsleuth/
- STUTCHBURY LAB: Behavioural and Conservation Ecology http://www.yorku.ca/bstutch/
- Ebird http://ebird.org/content/ebird
- La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica www.ots.ac.cr/en/laselva
Photos
BirdSleuth boys watching birds with binoculars
The BirdSleuth Costa Rica logo
Students learning about bird silhouettes at the Sarapiqui Learning Conservation Centre
Lilly teaching a student about the differences between two species of toucans.
Students using their Pocket Naturalist Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica to teach the class about bird field marks.
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