Rising Pressures
Changing Climate, Virtual Skiscapes: Decentering Communities of Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Muniz, Matthew Tornow
By engaging in outdoor sports and activities, people develop communities of practice that imbue landscapes with cultural meanings. Communities of practice that engage in winter sports, such as Nordic skiing, are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change as winters grow shorter and warmer. Social distancing in response to COVID-19 decentered community engagement with cultural landscapes as many cross country ski events created virtual options for participating in novel forms of citizen races. Examples include skiing at alternative venues, or substituting another activity (e.g., running, cycling, swimming) in place of skiing. An anonymous survey of 1300 cross country skiers provides multifaceted data on how virtual participation in otherwise in-person events affected perceptions of culture and community at various social and geographic scales. This research evaluates an adaptive local solution for dealing with global climate change. While dispersed virtual events may provide local solutions to lack of snow, they may also disrupt the connection between human behavior, cultural landscapes, and meaning. Adapting to shorter and warmer winters by relying on virtual participation in ski events creates the added danger of masking the effects of climate change by allowing the culturally sanctioned substitution of one appropriate “skiscape” for another.
Resistance in Design: Design as an Agent for Stimulating Solidarity Economy in the Anthropocene
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Predan
The paper focuses on demonstrating the possibilities of life. From the standpoint of design, it examines the potentials of this capability (and understanding of its shortcomings) based on the premise that “everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969). Design is thus an inseparable part of participation, which still does not spontaneously provide an answer to the questions of who is participating in where designers can/want to make the preferred changes. Based on the emerging theoretical foundations of the solidarity economy and the commons (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Manzini 2015 and 2019), and through design practices of design groups and individuals (Oloop, Avtomatik delovišče, ProstoRož, Trajna Society, Elena Fajt, and the Today is a New Day Institute), the study verifies grassroots initiatives and shows the possibilities of practising solidarity economies. In other words, the text propounds possible ways of creating distance, alternatives to the life of the submissive, and what possibilities are demonstrated by design in the given context.
Cementing the Future: The Predicament of Built Environment in the Liminal State View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Glen Kuecker
Recent meetings of the complex of actors and organizations constituted by the Post 2015 Agenda are marked by the technocratic elite’s epistemic panic over the lack of progress in accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the failure to meet the emission reduction targets established in the Paris Climate Accords. With eight years remaining in the Post 2015 Agenda, the predicaments facing the global community continue their path toward becoming wicked rather than solvable problems. Among the pressing issues is the materiality of our built environment, with one material, cement, playing a key role in determining our common future. This paper explores the place of cement within the predicaments facing the global community in the question of transition from the modern system to a new civilizational complex, a process driven by an age of disruption that is caused by modernity’s ongoing systemic collapse. The paper argues we are in a liminal state of transition between civilization complexes when anachronistic practices, such as the use of cement for the built infrastructure, persist amid the gradual emergence of a new civilization. Cement illustrates to us the reasons for the failure of the Post 2015 Agenda and suggests ways for understanding the brewing epistemic panic among increasingly desperate technocrats.
Featured Preserving a Changing Environment: Conservation Practices in the Logarska Dolina Landscape Park, a Slovenian Alpine-glacial Valley
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tina Krašovic
The paper focuses on contemporary environmental changes and conservation practices in the Logarska dolina (Logar Valley) landscape park, an Alpine-glacial valley in Slovenia. I visited the area as part of two ethnology camps (in 2020 and 2021) organised by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. The fieldwork was carried out mainly through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the inhabitants. The valley was formally protected at the initiative of the local population, who actively shape the area’s heritage through everyday practices and different land uses, with the main contribution of conservation institutions being on a discursive level. Protective legislation can therefore direct human practices in such a way that the intended image of the landscape is preserved. However, in parallel with human activities, many natural factors (some of which are human-induced) also affect the landscape. For conservation institutions, these are often unpredictable and uncontrollable. As examples, I review three recent events that had an impact on the landscape park (as well as a larger area) and on how the inhabitants carried their economic activities: the windstorm in 2017; the excessive rainfall in 2020; and the drought in 2022. I then examine how Slovenian conservation institutions are handling the consequences from such occurrences and whether they are even able to do so in a way that maintains the landscape's supposed features.
