Correspondences: Sketches for regenerative scholarship. Caroline Gatt and Joss Allen In what follows we develop our ideas through sketches, plans and text for a College for regenerative scholarship. Through this exchange form, marginalia and layered voices and traces are equally important to the textual parts. In recent decades there has been a shift across a wide range of disciplines away from fixist ontologies towards what might be called emergence ontologies. Examples include chaos and complexity theories (Mosko and Damon 2005); movements such as the Hearing Voices Movement, which have shaken the sovereignty of biology in the psychiatric sciences (Blackman 2016); writings on the Anthropocene (Meulemans 2017; Blaser, forthcoming); indigenous scholarship (Cajete 1994; Todd 2015); and efforts to build alternative and decolonized universities (la paperson 2017; Escobar 2018). These also include various ontological/ethnometaphysical approaches in anthropology where it is the very constitution of the world that is explored, rather than cultural difference overlaid on a universal nature (see also Blaser 2010; de la Cadena 2015). The common thread that runs through this work is the acknowledgment that academic disciplines need to be reformulated in order to transcend rigid distinctions between natural and humanistic subjects of study. Correspondence, as Tim Ingold (2013) has developed the concept, is one approach to transcending such distinctions. Correspondence proposes an onto/epistemology: the world, in this light, is better understood as a continual process of mutual formation, and knowing in the world is better understood as participation in those ongoing, mutually constitutive processes. Yet there are major obstacles to the uptake of such an approach. Contemporary universities do not know what to make of emergence onto/epistemologies, given that they tend to separate study from other spheres of activity. The assumption here is that scholars alone can lift themselves
above emic cultures and generate etic theories (Ingold 1993); that they alone can leave Plato’s cave (Latour 2003) or adopt a view from nowhere, what Donna Haraway (1988, 581) has called “the god trick.� In contrast, correspondence as an onto/epistemology embraces not only its positionality, but also the challenge of responsiveness in the midst of action. It prompts us to be deliberate about how scholarly artifacts fold their way into the research process, and about the effects that any scholarly practice always already has in the world (Gatt and Ingold 2013). In order to learn/study with multiple human and nonhuman others, the whole orthopraxy or conduct of our discipline needs to be revisited (Gatt 2018). So, we might ask, what would an educational institution that embraces an onto/epistemology of correspondence look like? And what types of scholarship can we develop to support a regenerative, sustainable, decolonized way of life?