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Document Type
Text
Broad Creation Date
2025
Language
English
Location
Portland
Abstract
Contemporary time is marked by the proliferation of the endings of many worlds and as such the pivotal question becomes how can we become attuned, responsive, and responsible to these myriads of endings that are both material and immaterial, insensible and unintelligible to our limiting, human-only sense experience? This dissertation, oriented as an ongoing remapping project along both ethical and aesthetic fault-lines, argues and responds performatively to the imperative that thinking (as well as human-only iterations of time, space, and identity) itself be re-thought, re-defined, and practiced within the transfiguration of mourning and of the spectral— a transformation of thinking into mourning as generative, participatory, and performative mourning-with divergent, marginalized, and multispecies storytellers, participants, and ghosts. Mourning is both a deconstructing and generative constituting force that disrupts singular narratives of human exceptionalism, allowing for anthropocentrism to become loosened from classic ideologies and discourses, specifically the entrenchment of us versus them within human thinking and mapping practices. Outside of the limits of human sense experience, language, and representation mourning-with performs a reconfigured, epistemological pathway that creates a transfiguration of the ethical within aesthetics, an alternate space of ongoing weaving that I call vi the aesthetic-ethical pathway. This pathway, performed here through the methodological weaving practice of bringing together philosophical theory with narrative through the geographical motifs of land and sea, enables the work of an ongoing heteroglossic-hospitality that enlarges ecological consciousness and engages that which resists human-only senses, language, and mapping practices and enacts the space wherein we can begin to imagine equitable futurities for all manner of being to live and die well. Encountering both material and immaterial lines and threads that compose our shared and entangled worlds in-trouble requires a multispecies, more- than-human, and posthuman aesthetic-ethical imagination that allows for an ongoing poiesis of interrelationality and interdependence—the ongoing poiesis of mourning-arts.
Disciplines
Aesthetics | Anthropology | Communication | Philosophy | Psychology
Publisher
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
City
Portland ME
Recommended Citation
Moulton, Jacqueline Viola, "MOURNING-ARTS —MAPPING MULTISPECIES AESTHETIC-ETHICAL PATHWAYS" (2025). Academic Research and Dissertations. 70.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/70
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