Reflective and Ethnographic Work on Everyday Socio‑Environmental Worlds

 

Hosted by University of Limerick, University of Trento (in collaboration with Ethnography Community Trento) and UHasselt 

Date: 27 and 28th of October 2027

Track Leads: Cristiano Storni, Mark Marshall (University of Limerick), Chiara Bassetti (University of Trento)

 

 

Within the project Reworlding, a doctoral networked financed by the EU commission, a group of designers, artists and social scientists from various universities and policy institutions based in different countries (https://reworlding.eu/thenetwork), work towards challenging questions to reimagining current design and research practices in times of socio-ecological crises. 

 

REWORLDING understands this work as a process of unworlding - moving away from current, unsustainable and broken ways of living in which many worlds collide - towards reworlding: exploring alternative ways of living together in which many worlds can co-exist. Retracing is one of the core capabilities this process calls for.

 

With retracing, we acknowledge current limits in capturing, understanding and being attentive to the intricate interdependencies and the effects of our action in the world. How we eat, move, work, dress, care, grow food, use energy and water, inhabit homes and neighbourhoods, or interact with infrastructures everyday connect us to a vast network of humans, institutions, but also material, animal, plants that often remain invisible. Socio-environmental challenges are often approached through broad systems, institutional frameworks or predefined categories. Yet the realities of environmental change are also produced and experienced through our ordinary practices, relations and the dependencies of everyday life. With this in mind, we explore what it means to move beyond engaging with institutional agencies and frameworks toward more careful, situated and in-depth understandings of the different relations, temporalities and interdependencies in everyday life when we move, transport and communicate, eat, farm and grow food, use energy or water, manage housing, etc. 

 

About this track: 

 

Retracing invites us to look closely at these everyday realities and follow the relations, dependencies, perspectives, histories, and temporalities through which everyday worlds are produced and transformed. Retracing is therefore best understood as a form of proactive engagement rather than contemplation from a distance: it asks us to attune to, to follow, to notice and actively encounter multiple actors and their perspectives, rather than simply observing them from a fixed position or a dominant framework. It also asks to slow down, to situate within the practices and attend to the details of what becomes visible, the contradictions and connections that can be overlooked by conventional forms of research, design and policy.

 

Retracing can reveal forms of knowledge and expertise that are embedded in everyday life but remain marginalised or invisible within dominant systems of knowledge. It can bring together different experiences and perspectives, including those of farmers, care workers, tenants, migrants, elders and  communities. It extends to infrastructures, materials and more-than-human worlds by inviting us to retrace water, soil, energy systems, animals, plants and other more-than-human presences that are key elements in our everyday life. In doing so, retracing can challenge established understandings of socio-environmental realities and create new conditions for reworlding.

 

We ask this central question: How can we retrace everyday socio-environmental realities in ways that reveal hidden relations, situated knowledges and multiple temporalities, and create conditions for reworlding?

 

What are we interested in? For this track, we invite contributions that carefully and actively observe, follow, document, interpret or make tangible everyday socio-environmental realities and the relations that shape them. We are interested in contributions that explore how different actors and their worlds, temporalities, forms of knowledge and dependencies become entangled in everyday life. Contributions may engage with empirical research, ethnographic observation, participatory design, situated practice, visual and material research, or other forms of inquiry and knowledge-making. 

 

To explore our question, we launch a call to submit relevant practices for retracing under three Conversations, addressing the above question and the following themes:

 

Conversation Theme 1. Tracing everyday relations and entanglements

How do everyday practices reveal the complex relations between people, places, infrastructures, materials, technologies and more-than-human worlds? We invite contributions that trace practices such as eating, dressing, farming, moving, working, caring, housing, energy and water use, repair or communication, and explore the wider socio-environmental relations through which they are sustained.   

 

Conversation Theme 2. Tracing situated and plural knowledges 

Everyday practices contain forms of knowledge and expertise that may remain overlooked or marginalised within dominant ways of understanding socio-environmental realities. These can include embodied, local, experiential, intergenerational, marginalised, non-formalized and more-than-human forms of knowing. How can retracing make these knowledges visible without separating them from the practices and worlds in which they are situated? How can participatory and ethnographic approaches such as diaries, visual walks, counter-mapping, storytelling or other situated methods, support this process? 

 

Conversation Theme 3. Tracing temporalities, rhythms and change 

Everyday life unfolds through multiple, entangled temporalities. Seasonal rhythms, routines, cycles, slow transformations, disruptions and unexpected events emerge through the ongoing relations between human and more-than-human worlds, shaping how socio-environmental change is experienced and enacted. How can retracing these temporalities reveal emerging uncertainties, tensions and possibilities? What becomes visible when we attend to rhythms and changes that are difficult to capture through conventional representations? We are particularly interested in contributions that use retracing to unsettle established ways of seeing and open up new ways of questioning and understanding the interconnected temporalities, rhythms and changes in our worlds.