In various ways and with various consequences, we all experience limits. The earth itself is constantly reminding us of its limits, often met with great resistance in acknowledging its state.
We as a Lab have various limits and are practicing how to learn from them: bodily limits, time limits, technological limits, skill limits, space limits, social limits, funds limits, method limits, political regulatory limits.
For 2021, we decided to focus on limits, having been through times of restrictions in response to corona spreading. We started the year being at home and are ending the year in our various forms of home offices. Although we at times have been less willing to connect to our limits, they have shown up in various ways and also in ways we did not expect.
One of them being through empty seats. Workshops and events are a large part of ETHOS’s life and contribution to the academic community. During prior workshops and events, we would know that people would show up and take part. This year it has been different: the certainty was lost. When the restrictions loosened, we wondered if there would be a collective accumulated desire to attend shows, plays, and talks. However, just as people did not flock to see the new exhibitions, there were empty seats at our events.
Firstly, feeling puzzled and slightly rejected, we realized that low participation could be a result of people protecting themselves and taking care of limits to their energy after a long lockdown. The capacity to be in social settings perhaps needs more time to recalibrate – as we ourselves also have experienced. Some of us attended beyond our limits earlier on.
We could feel joy and care for those not attending, but also exhaustion from the emotional and practical labour of planning and preparing, to arrive at yet another cancellation or postponement.
A limit we previous have neglected to see became visible to us as we hosted a Junior Researcher project in the Lab. The project involved building a solar driven server, which made us question our own website infrastructure and energy consumption.
Now we are beginning an exciting experiment where we will host our ethos.itu.dk site on a solar driven server, located in our Lab. In this newsletter, we are sharing a recent blog post going deeper into the reflections on working with ecological limits and the sly feeling of pleasure following the possibility of having a site that will not always be available.
Yet there are limitations which we wish were not there.
The declaration “On excessive activism in certain research environments” - which was signed by a broad coalition in the Parliament in June 2021 - evoked feelings of frustration and grief amongst the Lab and our peers.
Frustration that politicians aimed to delimit knowledge production, while at the same time denying that they were attempting to do so. Frustration over the glorification and simultaneously misconception of “neutral science”. Grief that the research that many of us aim to do was targeted for restriction. It feels difficult how to learn from this moment, even as we saw mobilization within our research groups and support for one another at a time of vulnerability.
As the year is slowly ending, we are looking ahead to ensure we have space to play around with methods and reflect on methodology in Spring 2022. A priority for us will be to nurture our own Lab community and build up our skills.
Learning from limits, we might do fewer workshops and think about other ways of doing collective reflections and sharing.
Care for your limits and enjoy your Decembers.
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ETHOS Lab
www.ethos.itu.dk
Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Rachel Douglas-Jones
Lab Manager: Merethe Riggelsen Gjørding
