ORCID

Abstract

The List of Works submitted comprises research through film, text, exhibition, performance and policy engagement, developed during a three-year period from 2021 to 2024 in the site-specific location of Southwest England. This multi-modal and interdisciplinary practice is framed in response to the question of how art and cultural strategy can, in the contexts of climate breakdown and global racial inequity, be conceived of as agency for environmental justice. In this integrative summary, I present a theoretical framework where ecology, in response to conditions of environmental crisis, is understood not only as a subject of inquiry but also as method. In part 1, by way of introduction, I discuss the purpose of this text and its pertinence within a wider field of ecology and art. In part 2, I locate my practice within contexts of climate justice activism, decolonial cultural theory and the COVID-19 pandemic, all of which influenced the establishment, in December 2021, of Radical Ecology, an artist-led studio for decolonial environmental research that I co-founded and direct (and whose activity underpins the List of Works) precisely as agency to recognise the nature and origins of contemporary global crises and to fashion cultural and strategic responses that can lead, in contradistinction, towards sustainable and liveable futures. Here, I also engage auto-ethnography as a tool for describing, within my practice, an evolution towards ecology as method through three distinct preceding stages, namely: (1) voice, (2) witness and (3) representation. It is through this process of evolution that (4) ecology, during the course of two decades as both a racial justice activist and filmmaker has, for me, come to be understood as a method that is fundamentally distinct from the method of representation that, in an earlier stage of my artistic practice, was predominant. In part 3, I discuss the key concepts of (1) planetarity and (2) relation that have come to inform my understanding of ecology as method now, pointing to the theoretical antecedence of Gilroy (2000), Spivak (2003), Mbembe (2019) and Chakrabarty (2021) as well as of Lovelock and Margulis (1974) and Latour (2017) in articulating ideas of planetarity and the planet, and of Glissant (1990), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Oliveros (2005) and Rawes (2013), whose ideas, including the poetics of relation, rhizome, deep listening, and relational architectural ecologies, anticipate the function of relation as a conductor of new cultural ecologies. As Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), say of the rhizome, it “connects any point to any other point” and it is this radical intersectional possibility that informs the method presented here and through which the certainties of an old order can be dismantled as the world is made anew. Through a further discussion of the application of time and temporality within my practice, I go on to explore how planetarity and relation are realised, throughout the List of Works, as values that are elaborated within the List of Works in the form of durational and performative techniques including (1) participation, (2) improvisation and (3) transcendence where the embodied meaning of ecology as method is revealed as a time-based process that facilitates the breakdown of distinction between subject and object, bringing the atomised neoliberal human subject into an awareness of belonging within a wider ecosystem of being and change. In the fourth and final part, I argue that this work advances a decolonial ecology through the development of ecology as method as a situated, relational, and practice-based framework, evidenced across a body of site-specific cultural works realised in Southwest England. In a region where dynamics of imperial expansion, environmental exploitation, and racialised worldmaking have been historically embedded since the sixteenth century, these works collectively demonstrate how planetary conditions of climate crisis and coloniality can be engaged through localised cultural practice. Through this body of work, ecology as method is shown to function not only as a conceptual framework but as a repeatable and transferable mode of practice through which relations between place, participants, institutions, and environments are actively organised and transformed. The contribution to knowledge therefore lies in demonstrating how site-specific cultural production can mediate between planetary scale and lived experience, generating forms of situated environmental agency that extend beyond representation into institutional and organisational domains. In this way, ecology as method emerges as both an analytic and an applied framework for engaging the entangled crises of climate and coloniality, offering a model for decolonial cultural practice that can be adapted across diverse contexts and scales.

Awarding Institution(s)

University of Plymouth

Supervisor

Sana Murrani, Sarah Blissett

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2026

Embargo Period

2026-06-23

Deposit Date

June 2026

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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