GERMINATIONS 2024: Nature isn’t Binary, Land isn’t Dry

Speakers
Sara Granados (The Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit, UCL)
Jorge Díaz (Cell & Developmental Biology, UCL)
Chair: Lisa Blackmore (University of Essex)
Living amid environmental crisis, political intolerance, and widespread discrimination necessitates strategies of adaptation and resistance for collective survival. Activist-researchers have long been interested in amphibious cultures, seeking to foster more resilient and collaborative ways of being in shifting territories and more-than-human communities. In the 1980s, Orlando Fals Borda's fieldwork with Colombian peasant communities enabled him to theorise amphibious cultural practices and identities as strategies to survive and resist assimilation into elite/official cultures. Recent debates in the arts have turned to forms of fugue (Fred Moten) and not-being-composed (Fahima Ife) as examples of generative political errantry defying enclosure. Brigitte Baptiste's work connecting biology and queer theory insists on nature's sexual diversity, calling for a revision of heteropatriarchal and colonial protocols in the natural sciences.
The first GERMINATIONS 2024 event brings into dialogue Sara Granados and Jorge Díaz, researchers engaged in studying amphibious and fluid forms in biology, territorial practices, and strategies of political resistance and activism. Their presentations invite us to consider how transdisciplinary, engaged research can contribute to discussions about social and environmental justice and generative arts, sciences, and community crossings. Through his postdoctoral research into collective cellular migration, Jorge will share the amphibious practices that connect the microscopic visions from his laboratory work and the non-binary nature of the frog cells he studies to broader social contexts of gender dissidence, science communication, and creative collaborations. Sara will offer insights from her fieldwork and arts-based research into the terraforming strategies of amphibious communities, considering how these practices might hold seeds for more just modes of pluriversal coexistence.