Residential Programme

The Residential Programme is what turns a conventional Masters course into a life-changing learning experience. Essentially it will consist of a set of structured learning activities that can be but are not necessarily assessed as part of an academic programme. All of the activities will be open to all students. Many will be available as free-standing short courses.

Although not necessarily formally connected to the academic courses, these activities are intended to contribute to student understanding of the central intellectual problem of humanity's relationship with nature. The practical skills of Woodland Management for instance will be connected to discussion and reflection on the long term relationship between humanity and arboreal landscapes, and the deep-seated propensity of our species to manage landscape ecology both as an unintended outcome of other activities (e.g. the use of fire in hunting large game), or intentionally as an aspect of agricultural and later industrial activity. Field_ecology, botany and ornithology are likewise intended to stimulate an 'education of attention' -- to engender in the student an understanding of the deep, semi-conscious awareness of the natural environment that would have formed a natural cognitive orientation for hunter-gathers and pre-modern farmers.

There is also a more specific intellectual rational that underpins the wider intellectual mission of the Institute in relation to human ecology. All of our research and teaching starts from the notion of humanity as a naturally 'terraforming species' i.e.) that a species equipped with language and culture is predisposed to radically transform the environment and eventually the entire planet. Whilst modules dealing with issues of sustainability must necessarily focus on problems of public policy over much shorter time-frames, there is a really difficult underlying issue of human nature. If language and culture gives humanity a propulsive, forward motion, how far is it really possible to slow down the pace of social development, moderate economic growth and develop a more balanced relationship with the biosphere?

The Residential Programme is designed to create a collective engagement with this deeper problem.

• Combined with modules in ethnobotany and ecological anthropology, studies in Bushcraft will sensitize students to the experience and cognitive world of Paleolithic British aboriginals.
• Running the Smallholding and experiencing the frustrations and deep satisfactions of self-sufficiency will likewise provide students with a sense of the escalating process of nature-management that emerged in the wake of agrarianisation.

Together, food procurement through Bushcraft and Smallholding will provide a proxy for the most important phases in the pre-history of humanity's relation to non-human nature. Getting dirty hands and partially re-living rhythms of daily and seasonal food provisioning, will provide visceral encouragement for individual reflection and group debate about the past, present and future of human ecology. The extended 'bodily engagement' in a very local and personal process of ecological transformation will facilitate what Tim Ingold has described, in the context of skills development among hunter-gathers, as the 'education of attention'. In a nutshell, the Residential Programme will intensify student motivation, providing a continuing foil for the intellectual problems raised by the coursework, stimulating reflection and debate.