Remote and Intimate Sensing: Ethno-ornithology, climate change, and the soundworlds of the Africa-Eurasia flyways
Professor Angela Impey (SOAS)
Ethno-ornithology, climate change and the soundworlds of the Africa-Eurasia flyways Angela Impey (SOAS) What new insights might be revealed about climate change by integrating culturally specific biocultural knowledge with cutting-edge scientific research on bird phenology? How might this ‘coalitional knowledge’ (Haraway 2017) guide climate mitigation actions, with implications for livelihood adaptation and ecosystem management? In this paper, I introduce new research that aims is to build epistemological coherence between disparate climate ontologies, integrating intimately-sensed ethno-ornithological knowledge curated by indigenous and local people along the Africa-Eurasia flyway with remotely-sensed satellite data on shifting bird migration evidencing environmental change. Recognising sound as the principal interconnecting communication faculties of both human and avian worlds, and ‘acoustic phenology’ as spatially and temporally significant, the project considers how listening in to the spillages and overlaps between different human and non-human knowledges may help to transform our politics and ethics, at once attuned to the realities and specificities of history, yet active in the possibilities they offer for alternative futures.