**An Animist view of therapeutic heritage: Haraway, Wall Kimmerer, and Le Guin as theoretical guides**

Donna Haraway speaks of ‘making kin in the Chthulucene’, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote often of imagination and relationship to other ways of knowing, and Robin Wall Kimmerer researched how integral humans are to the ecology of sweetgrass in America. These three strands weave together to invite inquiry around concepts of animism: namely, the world is full of beings and actors that are, at all times, conscious and impactful to us as individuals and as part of collectives.

As therapeutic heritage and archaeotherapy become more widespread in the UK, here I explore what meanings and applicability can be gleaned from Haraway, Le Guin and Kimmerer. Concepts such as ‘kin’ when applied to archaeology: is a building alive? Is a soil context communicating? Or the idea of being in relationship to the ecology of place: how does that present itself when guiding participants within a heritage setting? And the idea of speculative imagination: where does interpretation become imagination, and in therapeutic terms, how does this impact the work, if at all?

The time will be divided between a talk given by Hari, into smaller exploration groups, with a final wider group discussion.

Description supplied by the event organiser.