Ballads for Remembering

Ballads for Re-Membering is an examination of themes of consciousness such as time, space and emergence, set against the precarity of the climate crisis. Using an arts-and-Zen-practice-based methodology of research-creation, and a theoretical framework of New Materialism and Post-Humanism (“K(now)n Materialism”), this feminist response to the climate crisis manifests an otherwise-possible that is already right-here, taking cues from the emergent playful worlds of childhood studies and music, with interbeing as the net holding all.

The dissertation is important because the climate crisis is one of (if not the most) pressing and crucial challenges of the present, and we must keep finding ways to address it using our imaginations. Because my work uses a research-creation process, the methodology provides a unique opportunity to look at a complex set of issues in a nuanced and artistic way. The form also belies the function: These creative and academic outputs fold and knead together conceptual spaces; playful and engaging imaginings that slip through our habitual systematic thinking in linear time, space, and forward progress.

In the form of three Ballads, I look at time, space, and emergence (Ballad 1), offer a critical analysis of the New Nature Movement, look at childhood and time, and music (Ballad 2), and perform an audio story called Finding Solace (Ballad 3). This young adult story takes the research to the speculative: What if there was a world (mostly) without humans, where Artificial Intelligence was so intelligent, it went on “living” without humanity?

The key results of this work include making new forms of knowledge as ways of understanding our precarity; innovative research methods like song, story, and letters to my daughter; engaging and accessible research outcomes, and contributions to the field of New Materialism, Research-Creation, and artistic responses to climate change. It is my hope that this work encourages other researchers to explore interdisciplinary approaches, allows for engagement due to its accessibility, and contributes to a greater understanding of our interbeing.