The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
James Fairhead is an environmental and medical anthropologist at the University of Sussex, where he has been Professor since 2000. Much of his field research has focused on how farming communities in Central and West Africa understand and harness ecological processes in soils, crops, and vegetation. His books ‘Misreading the African Landscape’ and ‘Reframing Deforestation’ and a suite of academic papers on topics ranging from soil enrichment to the manipulation of wasps and termites, to the prevention of crop diseases, consistently reveal the hidden logics and wisdom behind local agroecological thought and practices. These works not only provide correctives to external scientific orthodoxies but in doing so reveal also the coloniality at play in the conduct of tropical ecology.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (2020). He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Merlin is a keen brewer and fermenter, and is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.
@MerlinSheldrake, @merlin.sheldrake
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