Nature immersion workshop: non-institutional

I guided an immersive workshop in Hampstead Heath on the 27th of August. Through touch, smell, play, imagination and language, we collectively explored multiple questions. How can we navigate through using lichen on a tree and learn to sense the micro-climates around us? How do London’s infrastructure shape how we know the natural world? How have our own pasts been shaped by the non-human world? How do different cultures define nature? The overarching idea of this workshop was to provide a space where participants could deepen and complicate their relation with the wider natural world.

The first half of the workshop guided participants to sense the forest, both learning how to figure out your direction using trees and lichen, as well as sense the age and micro-climates of the woods. The second part of the workshop involved a creative and contemplative process. Through fictional narrative, creative writing and probing questions, participants explored how their own lives have been shaped by the ecological webs around them. Poems, drawings and auto-biographical fragments unravelled beneath a canopy of birch trees.

The workshop aimed to bring anthropological techniques into the space. A core part of anthropology is exploring how foundational terms like ‘nature’ have radically different cross-cultural meanings. We unpacked the meaning of ‘nature’ in our own lives and cross culturally, becoming more aware of its shifting meanings through time and place and how humans have changed the way they narrativise their placement within a multi-species world. As with my previous immersive workshops, I draw on an ecological pedagogy that emphasises the senses, memory and emotion as indispensable mediums through which to learn more about ecology, nature and non-human worlds.

At the end of the workshop, participants were sent a collection of resources for more independent exploration, as well as citations of the authors who shaped the various activities.

The guided narrative framing of the second activity was inspired by Jo Krishnakumar who led an incredible workshop titled ‘Kicking Down Doors: Closets, Disciplines and the University’, as part of the Festival of Decolonial Learning for Westminster University (permission was granted to adapt the frame). See more of their work here.

If you can think of any institutions or workplaces that might be interested in hosting one of these workshops, please email me! florahastings3@gmail.com. I aim to run these workshops through 2024, including winter sessions!