NICOLA SPURLING, JEN SOUTHERN, CEMORE (Lancaster University)

Jen Southern : Mobilising Archives, Machines and Plants
This paper proposes art practice as a method of doing participatory environmental mobilities research. It uses a series of artworks made using machine learning as a method of entangling archives and environments. It focuses on an art exhibition by the author at a textile industry museum and the movements of water around and through the site to draw together historical and contemporary mobilities and their relationships to climate change and environmental emergency. Water brought the cotton industry to the North West of England, providing the damp atmosphere and water-power needed for spinning, and is integral to the life, death and erosion of meadows, trees, mosses and rocks that are features of that site. The researc takes a posthuman approach to climate and asks: What can humans and machines learn about the impacts of climate change and ecological emergency from the trees, meadows, moss and lichen, rocks and rivers at Quarry Bank Mill? 

Nicola Spurling : Im/mobile Autobiography: The mobilisation of life without children auto/biography and its significance 
The paper makes auto/biography the focal point of analysis and theorises its potential to be mobile or immobile. The theoretical developments of the paper are grounded in a mobilisation of life-without-children auto/biographical non-fiction across the last 10–15 years, in which those who do not have children, whatever the reason, have opened-up about their stories and found ways to share them with one another. The paper explicates an original concept immobile autobiography defined as: ‘life narratives that are invisible and side-lined, essentialized or not told in first person, and whose circulation both within (intra) and between (inter) generations is structurally limited’; and its converse mobile autobiography. (Im)mobile auto/biographies include, but cannot be reduced to, digital and physical mobilities. The potential of the concept lies in its ability to consider how lives, and the stories told about them, evolve, circulate and perform transformation, as they intersect with, transgress and re-shape changing (cultural) climates of a mobile world. 

Discutants/ Adrien Frenay, Lucia Quaquarelli