Please join us for the next BioCriticism webinar on participatory performances and citizen cyberscience:
Can participatory art and science help us see biodiversity?
25th of April 2025 at 14-15:30 Central European Time
a BioCriticism webinar with Eliane Beaufils and Shannon Lambert
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83110973753?pwd=fbEJsj4tAyLKK9hahWeCoLA7XeaHqK.1
Meeting ID: 831 1097 3753
Passcode: 187669
Speaker 1. Prof. Eliane Beaufils (Theatre Studies, Université de Paris 8), “The Democracy of Organisms: grow and multiply!”
This contribution aims to shed light on how a participatory theatrical device can be a biopolitical school for biodiversity. The Democracy of Organisms is a political-theatrical device that has been set up on a wasteland in Berlin, and that requires the participation of spectators. Inspired by Latour’s parliament, Club Real extends the democratic experience to other species to manage the wasteland. This presentation will first describe the processes of this theatrical democracy rooted in urban space. It will then explore how art becomes an interspecies behavioral laboratory that not only relies on concepts, representations and thought experiments, but also imagines practical extensions of theories. This kind of experiment could pave the way for the integration of plants and animals into urban management systems, and even into the functioning of Western politics.
Speaker 2. Dr Shannon Lambert (Literature, Ghent University), ““I see a starfish!”: Charting Excitement and Engagement in Online Marine Citizen Science Projects”
This talk looks at online citizen cyberscience projects like Plankton Portal and OceanEYEs (both hosted on the Zooniverse website) to investigate questions of participant motivation and interspecies empathy. In recent years, citizen scientists uploading and categorising of images on apps like eBird and iNaturalist has become a predominant source of biodiversity data across the world—even if these contributions are not always acknowledged in published scientific reports. I begin by exploring existing research on motivations behind individual participation in citizen science projects, before turning to a current gap in existing research: the role that interspecies interactions play in motivating participation. Zooming in on the “Talk” or discourse sections of these two online data categorisation projects, I consider instances of interspecies affect, moments where volunteers express feelings for the strange and often out-of-sight animals they are categorising, such as shrimp, stingrays, and starfish. What affects emerge, I ask, in an encounter between human and photographed creature? And, what insights might these glimmers of feeling offer for research on both participant motivation and multispecies ethics?
Eliane Beaufils is currently Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris 8, and a member of the “Scènes du monde” research unit. Her doctoral research focused on violence on contemporary stages in the German-speaking world. Since then, her research has adopted various focuses on contemporary theatricalities and performances, and on spectatorial autopoiesis, as in the books Being-With in Contemporary Performing Arts, edited with Eva Holling and published in Berlin by Neofelis in 2018, and a book whose title in English would be: Touched by Thought. Theatrical Criticality and Poetic Resonance (Toucher par la pensée. Théâtre critique et résonances poétiques, Paris, Hermann, 2021). Since 2018, she has been researching the theatricalities of the Anthropocene, in the projects Theater facing Climate Change (“Le théâtre face au changement climatique”) and Stages for a new world (“Scènes pour un monde nouveau”) led at EUR ArteC with Flore Garcin-Marrou. In this context, she has published twenty articles and two collective works, Dramaturgies des plantes (Tangence, n° 132, published in December 2023 in OA), and the book co-edited with Climène Perrin, L’Écologie en scène. Théâtres politiques et politiques du théâtre, published by Presses Universitaires de Vincennes in September 2024. This year she is delegated to the CNRS national center for scientific research to write a book on these topics.
Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of literary studies at Ghent University. Her work focuses on intersections between literature and science, with a particular interest in topics like narrative and emotion, and representations of the environment and nonhuman animals in literature. She is the author of Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge (Bloomsbury 2024).
BioCriticism is organised by Liliane Campos with the support of PRISMES EA4398 and the Institut Universitaire de France. For information and links, please contact liliane.campos@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr or check the BioCriticism website.
