Bioscopes


The Bite-size Blogger Collective is  an international group of volunteers working within the gift economy to tell environmental stories that value wildlife for its own sake.  Our aim is to move beyond simple recall of scientific information by focusing on bioscopes.  A bioscope is a bite-size version of UNESCO’s concept of a biosphere reserve.  It is a smaller realm of cultural ecology that functions in the “third place” between home and workplace.  Here there is a narrower, more creative interaction in a free, non-privatized environment that encourages and welcomes people of all genders, race, ethnicity, age and socio-economic levels.   Biospheres are regarded as being exceptally for their biodiversity and in need of special protection.  However, every place is special to people who are in day to day contact with its life forms, rare or common and bioscopes reflect this fact.


Bioscopes are learning places for testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding commonplace values and the need to  manage changes and interactions between human social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of local biodiversity. Their wider educational context is the magnification of living systems for democratic transformative learning.  Regarding its structure, a bioscope is the outcome of a voluntary social gathering place for telling stories about culture and sustainable development.  Personal bodies of knowledge are assembled around a bioscope that can be analyzed, synthesized and shared freely as blogs.


 Anyone can join the bite-size blogger collective by viewing its blogs or commentating on them.  You can also add your own blog simply by opening an account with Blogger, the free online blogging platform owned and hosted by Google. You can use it to create, write and publish blogs with all sorts of content from written articles to images to video and more. To make your blog available to others send its URL to;


bitesizebloggercollective@gmail.com 


from where it will be added to the collective’s public address book at;.


https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3844518346301038062/6249828106167168143


A central feature of bioscope stories is they have a particular capability to inspire intuitions and perceptions of kinship with nonhumans. For example, Aesop, of fable fame, by creating a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. Therefore, Aesop is an apt figure to symbolize a post-carbon future where we need to grow, learn and radically engage with the natural world.  In this respect, he offers up nonhumans as objects of thought to reorient culture towards ecology and away from no-growth economics. 


Bitesize bloggers therefore play the role of experts on the cultural dynamics of compassionate wildlife conservation. Wild things act as gatekeepers to the wild and stories about them explore the human capacity for giving nonhumans Aesopian powers to think, act and speak in ways that reveal some larger truth about life itself.  We are left with bioscopes to ponder what lies between us and them in a space between ecosystems and conservation management.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bite Size Blogging

Image
  Fig 1 Making a meal of data and knowledge Wales has many firsts in environmental education and a postcard educational database was invented by Welsh teachers in the late 1990s as “Postcards for Our Planet” (POP).  This was a pre INTERNET communication system linking schools in Wales and Portugal.  The objective was to model a global democracy of youth to access leaders with young people’s ideas and concerns about how to ‘rescue’ planet Earth.  It was a postcard version of the citizen’s environmental network proposed in the first UK strategy for sustainable development. The idea was to help young people identify the good and bad things about where they live, then work to improve the bad things and share their ideas, achievements and experiences globally with handmade postcards.  ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ (NNP) began in the 2010s as a microlearning scheme scheme linking primary and secondary schools in Wales with their European counterparts.    NNP revisits POP.  It is a mode
Read more

Postcards And Other Knowledge Nuggets

Image
(i) Postcards   A postcard holds tangible memories with pictures and words to amuse and delight.  ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ is a hybrid analogue/digital version of classical postcarding. It is part of a social platform that utilizes the mailing, networking technology of the 21st century to preserve the old-fashion handwritten bought postcard, but illustrating it with a unique handcrafted personalised image. These postcard pictures aren’t squashed versions of bigger, bolder artworks and photographs, like Twitter and Instagram. They are public works of art and you can display the pictures you make in your own gallery.  Also, postcards are valued because we can hold them and look at them over and over without the need to open a computer screen to search and scroll. It is Instagram and Twitter in one and every bit as lovely and keepable as the art we frame and hang on walls.  On the other hand, any kind of picture/text on screen package is a powerful tool for classroom learning an
Read more