Political Ecology tends to foreground the role of capitalist markets and state forces in processes of local dispossession and environmental disruption. Climate change is a significant issue in political ecology, a field that explores the impact of technosciences in local and global socioeconomic contexts.
The research project, which was supported by The Office of Scientific Research Projects in Istanbul Technical University (Project No: 44898) aims to explore technoscientific imaginaries of political ecology in artistic research in Turkey.
Technoscientific imaginaries, a sub-theme in feminist studies of Science, Technology, Society (STS) refer to shared visions of the future about science and technology, their relationship with social groups, and their mutual impacts. Those imaginaries shape how social groups associate with technosciences and effect policies they develop and deploy. Therefore, investigating such imaginaries is crucial for understanding social, economic, and political change, which may be seen as taboo, transgression, or transcendence.
The research paper was presented by Research Assistant Assoc. Prof. Ebru Yetişkin Doğrusöz in the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference of “Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science (TTT)”, hosted in Malta between 27-29 September 2023.
Yetişkin Doğrusöz discussed that challenging the dominant narratives of technoscientific imaginaries connects the local, the regional, and the global by transgressing boundaries across different disciplines and political-ecological pressures.
The research findings revealed contemporary disparities and injustices in the distribution of commons and commonings in political ecology by transcending beyond the boundaries constructed between local/global, natural/cultural and speculative/realist. A purposeful sampling and qualitative analysis of six contemporary artworks from Turkey, consisting of videos, NFTs, and performances, generated unexplored possibilities and opened up paratactical commonings of alternative future visions and more-than-human-worlds that may be more inclusive and empowering.
