Dr. Dylan McGarry
I have been carrying a concept for over a decade. An idea of suitably strange creative practice, and it’s role in transgressive learning, eco-social justice, public pedagogy and activism. The kind of learning that I have needed to transform these complex spaces has suitably strange processes - I have had to become a caring, yet disruptive 'trickster' in the social tissue of the world. I have (with my collaborators) needed to push beyond the norm, to transgress oppressive boundaries and to find ways of ‘un-stucking’ ourselves. In this practice-based collaborative exploration we came to realize quickly that we cannot push beyond these norms without care, without existential side effects and without understanding what constitutes ‘suitable’ transgression in this boundary crossing work. Disrupting the norm with ‘strangeness’ or the ‘uncanny’ could be ineffective, alienating and scary if it was done without a suitable level of care and caution, what Arjen Wals (2009) calls “optimal disruption”.
I am an Educational Sociologist, Ecologist and Artist and Early Career Researcher. I hold a trans-disciplinary PhD in Environmental Education at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, at Rhodes University in South Africa for which I also completed an apprenticeship period in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University. My academic work to date has mainly revolved around sustainable rural development and transformative social environmental learning. My MSc research explored the role biodiversity (particularly the use of wild food) played in the wellbeing of rural-children's lives affected by HIV/AIDS in South Africa. My PhD developed arts-based methodology for Environmental Education, with a focus on Social Sculpture and Empatheatre, a methodology which I have since applied in my post-doctoral work, with the award- winning play, ULWEMBU, and within the International Social Science Council’s Transformative Learning Research Programme. My current research is expanding a concept I call “Uncanny Justness” through practice-based research that applies suitably strange creative practice for transforming learning, activism and justice. My interests lie in ecological citizenship, rights for nature, Earth Jurisprudence, public pedagogies, decolonising education, and Transgressive Learning for social transformation. At the core of this work I explore the role empathy, imagination and moral intuition in expanding new forms of education for ecological citizenship.
I am an Educational Sociologist, Ecologist and Artist and Early Career Researcher. I hold a trans-disciplinary PhD in Environmental Education at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, at Rhodes University in South Africa for which I also completed an apprenticeship period in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University. My academic work to date has mainly revolved around sustainable rural development and transformative social environmental learning. My MSc research explored the role biodiversity (particularly the use of wild food) played in the wellbeing of rural-children's lives affected by HIV/AIDS in South Africa. My PhD developed arts-based methodology for Environmental Education, with a focus on Social Sculpture and Empatheatre, a methodology which I have since applied in my post-doctoral work, with the award- winning play, ULWEMBU, and within the International Social Science Council’s Transformative Learning Research Programme. My current research is expanding a concept I call “Uncanny Justness” through practice-based research that applies suitably strange creative practice for transforming learning, activism and justice. My interests lie in ecological citizenship, rights for nature, Earth Jurisprudence, public pedagogies, decolonising education, and Transgressive Learning for social transformation. At the core of this work I explore the role empathy, imagination and moral intuition in expanding new forms of education for ecological citizenship.
dr. Saskia VermelyEn
We’re all on a journey and I’m currently at a crossroad. The path that I just walked, though eclectic and somewhat bendy, has so far been quite linear. A mix of different disciplinary backgrounds, educated in different European countries and for more ten years now an academic. I had my first lectureship at Lancaster University in the Northwest of England, and moved a couple of years ago – coinciding with Brexit – further north and I am now based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. But I’m at a junction thanks to an uncanny encounter a couple of years ago when I met Dylan at a workshop in Norwich. We connected on so many levels: both privileged for being white, but deeply aware of wider struggles, we share a passion to understand and experience the world from different ways of being. We’re both been extremely lucky to have stayed and lived with and amongst Khoisan peoples. In a dark and wintry country pub far away from the place we hunker for, we shared our first dreams and visions of a place where we could work together and from where the healing could start by encountering the Other. With a helping hand of the ancestors, our encounters got uncannier and have contributed to finding myself at this junction. Most of my research centres around critiquing dominant property paradigms that have been used to justify the dispossession of land and enclosing knowledge and culture. I have studied alternative property regimes mainly through a combination of legal anthropological enquiries and a deep revisiting of dominant property ideologies that I deconstruct through a theoretical and legal-philosophical understanding of nomadic thinking. The nomadic thinking was initially inspired by empirical work and hanging out in the Kalahari, but after my PhD, I took a more theoretical turn as I felt I did not have the language and the (intellectual) gravitas or cultural understanding to portray the Other in an ethical and caring manner. In my attempt to dismantle hegemonic socio-legal processes, I delved into theories of alterity. For the last 5 years, I have tried to develop a new property theory inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas which I bring into conversation with post-colonial theory, legal anthropology and nomadic theories. This part of the journey will soon be shared in a monograph. I am increasingly aware that law is a performative process, steeped in rituals, told through stories, but I have been struggling to narrate the story that was unfolding when I did my initial stint of fieldwork with the San in the Kalahari. But through my collaboration with the Institute of Uncanny Justness, I have been mesmerised by the healing power of empatheatre and other performative arts practices. Together with the Uncanny Family, I am at this crossroad, embarking on a new journey. I am incredibly privileged and lucky that I can revisit the work I started long time ago. It feels like I need to move on from an epistemological understanding of colonial and neo-colonial legal processes. As I move from being an academic scholar to being an academic activist and aspirational performative artist, my methodological toolbox needs some aligning. To make amendments and to restore justness, I need to shift my focus to a material and ontological understanding of non Euro-American legal processes, lore in short. Though, this requires new modes of enquiry and makes me precisely so excited to be a seedling of the Uncanny Justness family. Over the next few years, I will study law as a medium of healing. This will be done through a practice based and embodied investigation how movement and dance are sources of law/lore. I’m going full circle: my first PhD was entitled ‘between law and lore: the tragedy of traditional knowledge’. More than a decade later, I think I’m one step closer in discovering the meaning of the title, but also the ‘mistakes’ thanks to that uncanny encounter in Norwich. I hope to have many more uncanny encounters through which we can heal and mend the unjustness, our mistakes but above all our own tragedy. Thanks Dylan for walking with me.