Time and Location
2:30pm -4pm, 5th May, Online, email to sign up!
Description:
Rituals are recurring actions that are imbued with meanings and narratives, it can be an awakening coffee that powers you through the day, a warm weekly chat with family, or a regular recuperating forest bathing retreat. Rituals can be designed to switch oneself into a specific mode of attention or consciousness, such as relaxing, focusing or caring. They can also be designed to create a sense of connection, such as a team gesture before a match or a presentation. If we think of our day-to-day encountering with lab organisms as containers of meanings instead of mechanical repetitions, what kind of stories do we want to tell through ritualising such human-nonhuman interactions? Is it a respectful and co-creative one? or a purely utilitarian one? Or an economical and productionist one?
What if we can lock ourselves in a cupboard for 5minute before we put our organisms into the incubator? What if we sing a eulogy before we put our plates into the autoclave? What if we dance before we put two organisms into a co-culturing medium?
How might we use rituals to better empathise with our lab organisms? How might we attune ourselves to them so that we can reflect on the exploitativeness we imposed on other life forms and take better care of them? How might we imbue respectfulness and recognition of the hidden labour of more-than-human lives through creating small rituals in the lab that licence us to have a moment of care and appreciation for the lifeforms that contribute to our scientific advancements with their metabolism, genomes, bones and fleshes?
Think about how lab work has already altered your life schedules, your work plans, and your ways of attending to details, we are consciously or subconsciously attuning ourselves to the way of lab organisms, but how can we see the world differently through such synchronisation and what new narratives and knowledge can we make with such multispecies entanglements? Interphysiology looks into the power of rituals to narrate such displacements or actively displace our biological rhythms, mindsets and perspectives for a better work culture with our more-than-human partners in the lab.