My Other Friend: An Ecopoetic Exploration of Friendship's Potential in the More-Than-Human Cit

Research Abstract This project examines how friendship functions in the 'more-than-human' city and how poetic practice can contribute to this, focusing on the city of Manchester. The concept of the more-than- human will be grounded in its original ecological sense (Abram, 1997) but also more recent interpretations which extend to the technological and spiritual. Ideas of 'friendship' will draw upon

Derrida's politics (1997) but also contextualise friendship within postcolonial and queer theories and practice (Gandhi, 2006). By engaging with interdisciplinary work from the fields of cultural geography, anthropology, sociology, politics and literary theory (particularly ecocriticism/ecopoetics), this research explores friendship's potential in more-than-human cities,

and its role in producing ecologically sustainable futures. The academic and creative outputs of the project will be a written 30,000-word thesis and a full-length poetry collection, which will work in tandem. This research will also have public engagement impacts, through the fostering of collaborative work and poetic interventions with Manchester-based literary and ecological

practitioners and organisations. Research Questions The project has three research questions: 1. In what ways does friendship function in the more-than-human city, and how might those functions be important in the context of climate crisis? 2. How does poetry, both individual and collaborative, contribute to a framework of

'environmental friendship', as both an ethics and creative practice? 3. How could a poetics that challenges urban human/non-human binaries be enacted and what would a more-than-human friendship-led poetics require? Detailed Project Description Through this PhD, I explore and develop an ecopoetic framework of friendship that challenges

existing anthropocentric approaches to urban space and place. The city offers exemplars of both success and failure in our relationships with the more- than-human world. Contemporary cities are sites both significantly affected by and significantly contributing to planetary climate breakdown (Steele, Wiesel and Maller, 2019). These are political

problems, so critical engagement with political thought is necessary to fully explore the research questions set out.

Although the political aspects of cities in the context of climate crisis are manifold, my focus is on the function of friendship. A framework of friendship allows for a broad, interdisciplinary approach while also giving enough specificity for the project to be achievable. Derrida (1997) wrote of the politics of friendship, and more recently writers such as Gandhi (2006) and Kern (2021) have drawn on his and others' work to incorporate feminist, postcolonial and queer thought in order to express the function of friendship within marginalised groups, including ecological activists.

I argue that friendship stands in opposition to the atomisation of neoliberal individualism. Tellingly, as neoliberalism has erupted over the last decades after Thatcher declared 'There is no such thing as society', and the human-caused destruction of the planet has both accelerated and become more evident, much has been written on the parallel increases in alienation, isolation and the accompanying physical and mental health problems.

Fisher (2011) writes of 'the privatisation of stress', arguing that a lack of social connections is embodied in society in our atomisation but also our crumbling social safety nets. Friendship, or a lack thereof, much like the city, can both affect and be affected by contemporary culture. Friendship, or its opposite, isn't limited to humans. In contemporary society, we are also atomised from environments and non-humans (Walton, 2021).