Wool Worked Worlds – Studying Industrial Landscapes through Collaborative Filmmaking

Annika Capelán, Centre for Environmental Humanities and Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University

Abstract: A paradox characterises wool production: it is highly industrialised yet cannot be detached from place-specific ecologies and social relations. Wool sheared from sheep is materially shaped by the geopolitical and ecological particularities of the grasslands where they are raised. The EU Marie Cuire funded project Wool Worked Worlds explores how these local diversities shape the global wool industry, and how local sheep rearing and landscape management practices are shaped by practitioners’ imaginaries of geographically distant parts of the wool industry. Bringing together different versions of global wool, the approach deploys collaborative filmmaking engaging the work and analysis of sheep farmers, indigenous/black/coloured community members, laboratory technicians and ambulant sheep shearers from three wool regions – the Karoo and the Lesotho highlands of Southern Africa, Queensland, Australia and Chubut, Patagonia. The collaborative aspects of the film making implies that the work will be dialogical and that the consultants’ analyses will shape the film. IMC Seed funding adds a new layer of collaboration through the involvment of three junior scholars, all of them with attachments to the South African grasslands, and substantial research experience there. Through their skills and backgrounds, the coworkers add disciplinary diversity and allow for further methodological experimention which is key to the project questions about methods and analysis, i.e. about our abilities to respond to landscapes that are ‘wool worked’; damaged or otherwise affected by the longterm presence of woolen sheep along settler colonial dynamics. IMC Seed funding also stimulates stronger cross-institutional program building between AU CEH and UCT EHS.

Formalizing Mechanisms of Turn-Taking: A Systematic Review of Models of Turn-Taking across Non-Human Animal Species

Christopher Cox, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University

Abstract: Vocal exchanges involve coordinated interactions between two or more participants who take turns in their roles as speakers and listeners. The fluency of these vocal exchanges requires dynamic negotiation of temporal structure. Turn-taking has been argued to function as a cognitive scaffolding to facilitate social interactions, and the basic optimisation principles of turn-taking behavior appear to exhibit similarity across different species. By systematically reviewing the literature, we can investigate mechanistic models of turn-taking, as well as provide a comparative perspective across species. In particular, we aim at answering the following questions: 1) which formalized models have been suggested for animal turn-taking? 2) can the models be generalized across species, and more generally, what can be learned by systematically implementing and comparing different models? 3) what can be learned on human turn-taking by conceptually and statistically applying these models to human data? 

Free of charge - All are welcome to attend