Projet "ExCoNat Project"
ExCoNat Project - Investigating the Experience of Connection to Nature
Chercheurs associés : Véronique Servais (anthropologie de la communication, LASC)
Project funded by la Pépinière Interdisciplinaire « Laboratoire de L’Education » Projet émergent du CNRS
Summary of the project
How can our lived experience contribute to renewing our relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world in a more caring and respectful way? How does our bodily experience contribute to a form of knowledge that brings us closer to what is alive in us and around us?
Our project aims at exploring and documenting the experience of connection/disconnection with nature (trees, fields, wind, rain, stones, animals, …) and other people, based on micro-phenomenological interviews. We will accompany people to describe their experience of one or more moments in which they felt that the degree of their connection with nature varied (increase or decrease).
ExCoNat (Investigating the Experience of Connection to Nature) aims at contributing to the fields of eco-psychology - understanding how people manage to regain contact with their own experience and how the experience of the unity of "human beings" and "nature" emerge – and educational sciences – broadening our conceptions of knowledge and knowing and understanding how contemplative pedagogies allow (or not) the relation between interbeing and our inner being.
Research project
General argument:
Humanity's broken relationship with nature has a cost, which was strikingly revealed with the Covid-19 pandemic episode: loss of lives and jobs, and a shock to the global economy. As a symptom of a broader systemic and ecological crisis, this pandemic adds to a long list of emerging disruptions that will continue to degrade global stability if we do not question our relationship with nature and our experience of nature.
Together with others, we argue that the ecological crisis is due to our way of life that depletes the earth's resources, and that this way of life and the ecological catastrophe it generates are deeply related to the forgetting of what is closest to us: our own lived experience. We maintain that regaining contact with our lived experience is the prerequisite that would allow us to regain our lucidity and find the courage to change our model of society. It aims to contribute to the shift "from ego to eco".
The ExCoNat project is part of a bigger project named DeepCoNat, for « Deep Connection with Nature ». This project is under development, and it aims at developing multiple studies on the educational issues of the connection (or disconnection) with nature, from a multidisciplinary standpoint.
Methodology:
The ExCoNat project is an exploration of the experience of connection/disconnection to nature in a threefold way.
Body experience through exercises
In this part, we aim at documenting the experience of being connected with nature (let’s say “nature”: it encompasses trees, fields, wind, rain, stones, animals, …) and other people through body senses. The specific exercises that we will be using were specifically designed to help the participants to disconnect from their mind and try to connect with their surroundings.
Micro-phenomenological interviews
Micro-phenomenological interviews entail to accompany people to describe their experience of one or more moments in which they felt that the degree of their connection with nature varied (increase or decrease).
Artistic expression of what has been lived.
The third moment has a double intention: to communicate what has been lived to other people (and not only scientists in a scientific paper) and to make something more collective from these individual experiences. It is believed that the micro-phenomenological interviews will influence the stage 3.
The scientific disciplines involved are first-person cognitive science, ethnography and anthropology. ExCoNat aims at contributing to eco-psychology and to educational sciences. If we admit that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of (in) education, then our research project ambitions to describe embodied ways of knowing that could be significant.
Researchers in the project
Ollagnier-Beldame Magali, CNRS researcher in cognitive science, ICAR UMR 5191, ENS Lyon (PI), France.
Servais Véronique, Professor of Anthropology of Communication, Université de Liège, IRSS, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle
Varrasso Pietro, Director and theater teacher, Conservatoire Royal de Liège, Ecole Supérieure d’Acteurs, Belgium.
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