By Jane Palmer and Dena Fam

2. Dena Fam (biography)
What might make us stop and think differently about the ways in which we interact with our environment and others, human and nonhuman? What kind of knowing about acute threats to the natural environment will sufficiently motivate action?
We suggest that art and literature can offer us a pause in which we might, firstly, imagine other less anthropocentric ways of being in the world, and secondly, a way into Basarab Nicolescu’s “zone of non-resistance” (2014, p. 192), where we become truly open to new transdisciplinary forms of collaboration.
Writers, artists and scholars have canvassed many ways of ‘pausing’ our accustomed thought processes: mindfulness and ‘mindwandering’, and solitude, as well as post-representational research, which is sensory, affective and exploratory. We are interested particularly in the kind of ‘pause’ that constitutes a transformative experience that changes our relations with others, human and nonhuman.