‘What language do the things of the world speak?’ (Serres 1992:12)

Inspired by the question above, this session adopts a New Materialities and Sensory Anthropological approach to think about human relationships with the environment and consider the distance intellectually placed between people and the rest of the physical world. Many claim that the current level of environmental damage is only possible because humanity continues to imagine they walk on, rather than are, the world. This session takes as axiomatic that current methods that understand the world as a bank of resources need to change and uses short, playful activities to think about the value of paying attention and what ‘hearing’ nature might both look like and do to practice. Using a selection of understandings associated with water, air and plants, this session will draw on Ingold (2022) and Marder (2013) to stimulate discussion on how paying attention redraws understandings of the world and can transform your understanding of how to be human.