John ryan | IIT Kharagpur (original) (raw)

Papers by John ryan

Research paper thumbnail of FloraCultures: Conserving Perth\u27s botanical heritage through a digital repository

FloraCultures is a 2013 pilot project in development with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth,... more FloraCultures is a 2013 pilot project in development with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia, and funded by Edith Cowan University’s Early Career Researcher grant scheme. The project aims to develop a model for documenting the plant-based cultural heritage of 30–50 indigenous species occurring in the Kings Park bushland. The FloraCultures initiative integrates archival and digital design techniques, creating a unique web portal of potential interest to a range of users -- from first-time tourists and amateur naturalists to heritage consultants and evironmental conservationists . The initiative reflects the belief that research into environmental heritage (defined broadly to encompass natural and cultural heritage and tangible and intangible theory) is integral to the conservation of flora and fauna in their ecological habitats. The project stresses that the appreciation of biodiversity for its cultural significance helps to sustain broader conservation values

Research paper thumbnail of Tree // Árbol

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2019

This is a long poem, a sequence of 24 sonnets on trees. Resumen Éste es un poema largo... more This is a long poem, a sequence of 24 sonnets on trees. Resumen Éste es un poema largo, una secuencia de 24 sonetos sobre árboles.

Research paper thumbnail of From the Anthropause to the Pandemic Turn: Emerging Directions in the Environmental Humanities in the Covid-19 Era

Transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 2021

This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, th... more This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, that underscore its diversity and timeliness as scholars from manifold disciplines turn progressively more to human-nature issues in the Anthropocene epoch. Emerging in the last decade in particular, the twelve specializations outlined in this article are animal and plant studies; Arctic and Antarctic humanities, Asian environmental humanities, blue humanities, emergency humanities, empirical ecocriticism, energy humanities, extinction studies, medical-environmental humanities, paleoenvironmental humanities, Symbiocene studies, and wetland humanities. On the one hand, new areas such as the emergency humanities and medical-environmental humanities have gained momentum in response to the Covid-19 pandemic beginning in early 2020. On the other, some EH areas focus on alternatives to Anthropocene malaise and possibilities for human-nature justice. Understood as a transdisciplinary meta-field—o...

Research paper thumbnail of The Virtual and the Vegetal: Creating a 'Living' Biocultural Heritage Archive through Digital Storytelling Approaches

Global media journal, 2015

FloraCultures is an online archive currently being developed in consultation with Kings Park and ... more FloraCultures is an online archive currently being developed in consultation with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia. The archive will showcase the ‘botanical heritage’ of indigenous plant species found in the extant bushland areas of Kings Park near the heart of the city. A selection of multimedia content (text, images, audio recordings, video interviews) and social media approaches (crowd-sourcing, interactivity, participatory media) will be brought together to highlight the cultural value of Perth’s bio-cultural diversity. This paper will analyse FloraCultures in terms of Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida’s theories of ‘the living archive’ in tandem with recent research into ‘digital storytelling’ through new media. Derrida argues that the living archive is brought into existence through the dialectic between the death drive (Thanatos) and the conservation drive (Eros), and that an interdisciplinary field of ‘archiviology’ is required to understand and develo...

Research paper thumbnail of Scholarly Ecotones in the Information Landscape

Landscapes: the journal of the international centre for landscape and language, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

Landscapes: the journal of the international centre for landscape and language, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of DECENTRING THE HUMAN, IMAGINING THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN (Poetry, Plants, and the New England Region of Australia)

LITERA, 2020

Located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, the Northern Tablelands bioregion is a high p... more Located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, the Northern Tablelands bioregion is a high plateau landscape unique for its geological, faunal, and floristic variety. Known widely as the New England of Australia, the Tablelands is “a strange, almost inverted landscape” of undulating plains aside steep chasms. This article analyzes poetry about the flora of the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. The article focuses on the importance of plants and poetry to the biocultural heritage of Australia. The research objective was to understand the natural and cultural dimensions of Tablelands plants as expressed in poetry. The research involved visiting botanical communities, examining historical documents, interviewing conservationists, and writing poetry. The results suggest that poetry encourages engagement with, and respect for, human and more-than-human life. The article concludes that, in the Anthropocene age, environmental poetry is essential to environme...

Research paper thumbnail of Natural Heritage Conservation and Eco-Digital Poiesis: A Western Australian Example

Media International Australia, 2014

A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As... more A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As species and habitats vanish, so too can their biocultural heritage. To address biological and cultural decline, FloraCultures is a digital conservation initiative that uses archival, ethnographic and design approaches to conserve and promote Perth's ‘botanical heritage’. This article examines the project's conceptual foundations in terms of nature/culture, tangible/intangible and thinking/making dualisms, as well as some of the practical strategies used to address these dualisms. To articulate biocultural heritage, I have had to rethink categorical oppositions through ecopoiesis – the making of interactive digital objects as informed by ecological discourses. The repository being developed will incorporate cultural materials (texts, visual art, interview recordings, music and video) not conventionally associated with environmental conservation. Key community-building approaches,...

Research paper thumbnail of Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, Poetic Narratives, and Botanical Lives

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of A Comparative History of Resurrection Plants

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of “No More Boomerang”: Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry

Research paper thumbnail of FloraCultures: Conserving Perth's botanical heritage through a digital repository

Research paper thumbnail of Narrative Environmental Ethics, Nature Writing, and Ecological Science as Tradition: Towards a Sponsoring Ground of Concern

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a corporeal aesthetics of plants: Ethnographies of embodied appreciation along the wildflower trail

Research paper thumbnail of Toward An Ethics of Reciprocity: Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Medicinal Plants as Cancer Therapies

Research paper thumbnail of On the Death of Plants : John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2016

espanolA traves de la poesia del escritor y activista australiano John Kinsella (1963), este arti... more espanolA traves de la poesia del escritor y activista australiano John Kinsella (1963), este articulo hace hincapie en las dimensiones reales, en vez de metaforicas, de la muerte de las plantas frente al apremiante contexto internacional de acelerar la perdida de diversidad botanica (Hopper) y la alteracion antropogenica de las comunidades floristicas a nivel mundial (Pandolfi y Lovelock). En muchos niveles, cientifico, ecologico, social, metafisico, una apreciacion mas completa de la vida vegetal requiere una comprension de su declive, decadencia y desaparicion. Hacia una apreciacion mas matizada de las vidas de las planta, el debate suscita una distincion, pero tiene como objetivo evitar un dualismo, entre ejemplos “biogenicos” y “antropogenicos” de muertes de plantas. Teniendo en cuenta la correlacion entre la existencia vegetal, el bienestar humano, y nuestras vidas y muertes co-constituidas, afirmo que una perspectiva mas abarcadora y transformadora eco-culturalmente sobre las ...

Research paper thumbnail of UK Referendum and Potential Brexit

Research paper thumbnail of Hydropoetics: The rewor(l)ding of rivers

River Research and Applications, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of On the Death of Plants: John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia // Sobre la muerte de las plantas: El pastoreo radical de John Kinsella y el peso de la melancolía botánica

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2016

Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article ... more Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article emphasizes the actual, embodied—rather than metaphorical—dimensions of the death of plants vis-à-vis the pressing international context of accelerating botanical diversity loss (Hopper) and the anthropogenic disruption of floristic communities globally (Pandolfi and Lovelock). On many levels—scientific, ecological, social, metaphysical—a fuller appreciation of plant life necessitates an understanding of their decline, decay, and demise. Toward a more nuanced appreciation of plant lives, the discussion draws a distinction—but aims to avoid a binary— between biogenic and anthropogenic instances of plant-death. Considering the correlation between vegetal existence, human well-being, and our co-constituted lives and deaths, I assert that a more encompassing and ecoculturally transformative outlook on plants involves not only an acknowledgement of their qualities of percipient aliveness but a...

Research paper thumbnail of Foreword: Ecocriticism in the Age of Dislocation?

Research paper thumbnail of FloraCultures: Conserving Perth\u27s botanical heritage through a digital repository

FloraCultures is a 2013 pilot project in development with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth,... more FloraCultures is a 2013 pilot project in development with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia, and funded by Edith Cowan University’s Early Career Researcher grant scheme. The project aims to develop a model for documenting the plant-based cultural heritage of 30–50 indigenous species occurring in the Kings Park bushland. The FloraCultures initiative integrates archival and digital design techniques, creating a unique web portal of potential interest to a range of users -- from first-time tourists and amateur naturalists to heritage consultants and evironmental conservationists . The initiative reflects the belief that research into environmental heritage (defined broadly to encompass natural and cultural heritage and tangible and intangible theory) is integral to the conservation of flora and fauna in their ecological habitats. The project stresses that the appreciation of biodiversity for its cultural significance helps to sustain broader conservation values

Research paper thumbnail of Tree // Árbol

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2019

This is a long poem, a sequence of 24 sonnets on trees. Resumen Éste es un poema largo... more This is a long poem, a sequence of 24 sonnets on trees. Resumen Éste es un poema largo, una secuencia de 24 sonetos sobre árboles.

Research paper thumbnail of From the Anthropause to the Pandemic Turn: Emerging Directions in the Environmental Humanities in the Covid-19 Era

Transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 2021

This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, th... more This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, that underscore its diversity and timeliness as scholars from manifold disciplines turn progressively more to human-nature issues in the Anthropocene epoch. Emerging in the last decade in particular, the twelve specializations outlined in this article are animal and plant studies; Arctic and Antarctic humanities, Asian environmental humanities, blue humanities, emergency humanities, empirical ecocriticism, energy humanities, extinction studies, medical-environmental humanities, paleoenvironmental humanities, Symbiocene studies, and wetland humanities. On the one hand, new areas such as the emergency humanities and medical-environmental humanities have gained momentum in response to the Covid-19 pandemic beginning in early 2020. On the other, some EH areas focus on alternatives to Anthropocene malaise and possibilities for human-nature justice. Understood as a transdisciplinary meta-field—o...

Research paper thumbnail of The Virtual and the Vegetal: Creating a 'Living' Biocultural Heritage Archive through Digital Storytelling Approaches

Global media journal, 2015

FloraCultures is an online archive currently being developed in consultation with Kings Park and ... more FloraCultures is an online archive currently being developed in consultation with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia. The archive will showcase the ‘botanical heritage’ of indigenous plant species found in the extant bushland areas of Kings Park near the heart of the city. A selection of multimedia content (text, images, audio recordings, video interviews) and social media approaches (crowd-sourcing, interactivity, participatory media) will be brought together to highlight the cultural value of Perth’s bio-cultural diversity. This paper will analyse FloraCultures in terms of Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida’s theories of ‘the living archive’ in tandem with recent research into ‘digital storytelling’ through new media. Derrida argues that the living archive is brought into existence through the dialectic between the death drive (Thanatos) and the conservation drive (Eros), and that an interdisciplinary field of ‘archiviology’ is required to understand and develo...

Research paper thumbnail of Scholarly Ecotones in the Information Landscape

Landscapes: the journal of the international centre for landscape and language, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

Landscapes: the journal of the international centre for landscape and language, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of DECENTRING THE HUMAN, IMAGINING THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN (Poetry, Plants, and the New England Region of Australia)

LITERA, 2020

Located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, the Northern Tablelands bioregion is a high p... more Located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, the Northern Tablelands bioregion is a high plateau landscape unique for its geological, faunal, and floristic variety. Known widely as the New England of Australia, the Tablelands is “a strange, almost inverted landscape” of undulating plains aside steep chasms. This article analyzes poetry about the flora of the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. The article focuses on the importance of plants and poetry to the biocultural heritage of Australia. The research objective was to understand the natural and cultural dimensions of Tablelands plants as expressed in poetry. The research involved visiting botanical communities, examining historical documents, interviewing conservationists, and writing poetry. The results suggest that poetry encourages engagement with, and respect for, human and more-than-human life. The article concludes that, in the Anthropocene age, environmental poetry is essential to environme...

Research paper thumbnail of Natural Heritage Conservation and Eco-Digital Poiesis: A Western Australian Example

Media International Australia, 2014

A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As... more A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As species and habitats vanish, so too can their biocultural heritage. To address biological and cultural decline, FloraCultures is a digital conservation initiative that uses archival, ethnographic and design approaches to conserve and promote Perth's ‘botanical heritage’. This article examines the project's conceptual foundations in terms of nature/culture, tangible/intangible and thinking/making dualisms, as well as some of the practical strategies used to address these dualisms. To articulate biocultural heritage, I have had to rethink categorical oppositions through ecopoiesis – the making of interactive digital objects as informed by ecological discourses. The repository being developed will incorporate cultural materials (texts, visual art, interview recordings, music and video) not conventionally associated with environmental conservation. Key community-building approaches,...

Research paper thumbnail of Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, Poetic Narratives, and Botanical Lives

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of A Comparative History of Resurrection Plants

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of “No More Boomerang”: Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry

Research paper thumbnail of FloraCultures: Conserving Perth's botanical heritage through a digital repository

Research paper thumbnail of Narrative Environmental Ethics, Nature Writing, and Ecological Science as Tradition: Towards a Sponsoring Ground of Concern

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a corporeal aesthetics of plants: Ethnographies of embodied appreciation along the wildflower trail

Research paper thumbnail of Toward An Ethics of Reciprocity: Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Medicinal Plants as Cancer Therapies

Research paper thumbnail of On the Death of Plants : John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2016

espanolA traves de la poesia del escritor y activista australiano John Kinsella (1963), este arti... more espanolA traves de la poesia del escritor y activista australiano John Kinsella (1963), este articulo hace hincapie en las dimensiones reales, en vez de metaforicas, de la muerte de las plantas frente al apremiante contexto internacional de acelerar la perdida de diversidad botanica (Hopper) y la alteracion antropogenica de las comunidades floristicas a nivel mundial (Pandolfi y Lovelock). En muchos niveles, cientifico, ecologico, social, metafisico, una apreciacion mas completa de la vida vegetal requiere una comprension de su declive, decadencia y desaparicion. Hacia una apreciacion mas matizada de las vidas de las planta, el debate suscita una distincion, pero tiene como objetivo evitar un dualismo, entre ejemplos “biogenicos” y “antropogenicos” de muertes de plantas. Teniendo en cuenta la correlacion entre la existencia vegetal, el bienestar humano, y nuestras vidas y muertes co-constituidas, afirmo que una perspectiva mas abarcadora y transformadora eco-culturalmente sobre las ...

Research paper thumbnail of UK Referendum and Potential Brexit

Research paper thumbnail of Hydropoetics: The rewor(l)ding of rivers

River Research and Applications, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of On the Death of Plants: John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia // Sobre la muerte de las plantas: El pastoreo radical de John Kinsella y el peso de la melancolía botánica

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2016

Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article ... more Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article emphasizes the actual, embodied—rather than metaphorical—dimensions of the death of plants vis-à-vis the pressing international context of accelerating botanical diversity loss (Hopper) and the anthropogenic disruption of floristic communities globally (Pandolfi and Lovelock). On many levels—scientific, ecological, social, metaphysical—a fuller appreciation of plant life necessitates an understanding of their decline, decay, and demise. Toward a more nuanced appreciation of plant lives, the discussion draws a distinction—but aims to avoid a binary— between biogenic and anthropogenic instances of plant-death. Considering the correlation between vegetal existence, human well-being, and our co-constituted lives and deaths, I assert that a more encompassing and ecoculturally transformative outlook on plants involves not only an acknowledgement of their qualities of percipient aliveness but a...

Research paper thumbnail of Foreword: Ecocriticism in the Age of Dislocation?