Shared music-making as ecosophy.  Cultural mapping post-industrial areas of Scotland.

This performance piece will demonstrate how songwriting and music-making support social justice in third-tier cities, that is, cities that are in a period of post-industrial regeneration. Drawing on evidence gathered from my PhD thesis which looks at the perspectives of STEM academics in Scotland, together with autoethnographic dialogue the talk provides a discourse for ecosophy – that is ecological philosophy. This builds on Giuttari’s and Næss' theories on ecosophy which problematises the duality of human and natural (non-human) systems and aims to synthesize them. Using the example of the River Clyde in Scotland we will use music and stories to highlight post-industrial problems that affect this area and discuss how academics engage with this. The performance piece aims to find common ground to demonstrate how music-making and songwriting may be used to enable boundary-crossing to explore human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations in a post-industrial landscape. This arguably has wider implications for the scholarship of teaching and learning. We will discuss the links, between research, teaching and public engagement with science, which Stevenson and McArthur define as the "triple nexus". By illustrating the findings from interviews with STEM lecturers in a recent Scottish study we will conclude the presentation with an original song developed as an autoethnographic output from interviews which took place between 2021 and 2022.