Elemental Worlding: Second International Ecoliteracy Research Festival 2027
Under the title Elemental Worlding, we invite you to contribute to the second international ecoliteracy research festival (IERF). The festival takes place on August 17-20h 2027 (with a pre-festival on August 16h and post-festival on August 21-22) at Himmelbjerggaarden near Ry, Denmark. IERF explores new formats for bringing researchers together to create and exchange knowledge beyond standard conferences, not closed off from other people and the more-than-human world. All activities take place outdoors and formats move away from individual PowerPoint presentations in short time frames towards collective, eco-democratic, creative, and embodied forms of exchange. The aim is to foster generative research communities and relationships across the planet.
Our aspiration for the festival
IERF gathers researchers and others who are engaged in creating and exchanging knowledge about how to renegotiate human relationships with planetary life and educate for life-friendly futures. We explore how research, education, artistic, and cultural activities can support a transition from today’s culture, neglectful of life, towards a rediscovery of care, life-friendly societies, and ways of being as earth dwellers together with the rest of the natural elements of Terra.
Through polyphonic dialogues and experiments in carefulness, imagination, and focused entanglement, we seek to form new paths for becoming an ecoliterate people, (re)integrated in balanced natural systems. What can we learn from each other across continents and disciplines by paying heed to forms of being-in-the-world and generative powers marginalised, traumatised, or sidestepped by modern colonial, patriarchal, militaristic, capitalistic, and technoscientific comportments?
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