Originally published here.

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Birdwatching at twilight in Singapore. Audrey started by focusing on daily time – sunset in the work of Michael Taussig and its liminal, shifting qualities and associations with change, ritual and even magic. She linked this moment to the very different timescales associated with the Anthropocene and the contemporary sense that human societies are at the threshold of a new era. This is likely to be an era of loss and dramatic ecological and social change. Can we also locate in it the possibility of hope and find ways, like twilight, of reenchanting the more than human world? Audrey recounted an evening birding in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, reflecting on moments of engagement with a nature already being lost but also with sometimes surprising signs of continuity. We thank Audrey for sharing her charming drawing of the scene which forms the image for this post in the name of Taussig’s urging that we experiment with philosophies and practices of ‘the mastery of non-mastery’ – learning to live with the imperfection and even ineptitude needed to be authentically curious and open to a world that we can never know entirely and should not seek to dominate.