Enabling Living Ecologies: Towards a Transdisciplinary Framework for Research and Action

This paper introduces the framework of living ecologies as a multidisciplinary approach to research and action moving beyond contemporary states of unsustainability. Our work is situated in what we see as a interconnected and inherently multidimensional crisis; ecologically, socially, economically, epistemologically. Drawing on existing literature root causes to this crisis are elaborated with particular attention to the mastery of commons drawing on the critical theoretical notion of mastery of nature (Adorno & Horkheimer 1944) and governance of Earth’s commons (Shiva 2005). Arguing that qualitatively different approaches are needed we introduce the framework of Living Ecologies to acknowledge and act upon human-nature-society relations as an entirety, based on key principles of reciprocity, self-organizationand diversity. The paper exemplify how this framework enables to work across disciplines through four methodological steps, analyzingthe particular case of agroecological practices in Denmark, as an example of working with ambivalent potentials in such direction. First, it is shown how contemporary practices can be understood through sociology of absence and emergence (Santos 2007) highlighting how farmers experience-based cultural knowledge with farmlands as living ecologies, although nearly made absent through industrializedmodes of production, still remains latently present but highly marginalized. Secondly, it is shown how the use of future creation workshops can provide free spaces for social learning (Svensson & Aagaard 2007)in which lived experience and marginalizedknowledge can be shared and collectively acted upon. Thirdly, drawing on exemplary cases we discuss how marginalizedhuman-nature practices are embedded in a broader societal contexts, and how they can be organizedand strengthened by new forms of social economic collaboration. Fourth, we discuss how this work can be seen as part of broader democratic and political transformations(Haberl et al 2011) implying and building on new connections between urban and rural, food providers and consumers, and essentially new perceptions of human-nature-society relations as interconnected. On this basis we suggest that human-nature-society relations rooted in principles of reciprocity, selforganisation and diversity, although marginalized, can still be found and strengthened, by providing experience-based social learning spaces; enabling supportive modes of organization; and linking to broader paradigmatic and political changes. As such the paper suggest a Scandinavian contribution to the broader discussion of Buen Vivir highlighting how democratizingquestions on how we want to live and organizeourselves (Hansen et. al. 2016) embedded in, dependent upon and part of living ecologies, can take place in various forms in the North.