Connie McDermott & Joe Boyle invite you to an interactive ‘drop in’ session focusing on the Reverse Gaze.
Thursday, March 5, 2026
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM (come at 10.30 for refreshments)
Oxford Martin School, seminar rooms 1&2
How nature is seen determines how it is governed. The “Reverse Gaze” (a new Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery research stream) asks: How can we transform technology to expand our gaze on nature, to ‘see’ and account for a wider range of place-based knowledges, perspectives and actions on nature recovery?
Is it time for a new Nature Technology X? – An OS Mt. Olympus?
The recent explosion of nature technologies – from AI to remote sensing, drones, eDNA, and sensors of every description – has vastly expanded what we can ‘see’ and digitized, from outer space to the microcosm, without need for contact with the people and places being surveyed. This has made tremendous contributions to scientific understanding. But it has also narrowed our focus, and hence our vision, of who and what ‘counts’ towards knowledge, and towards global targets like Net Zero or 30×30.
What do you think? Do you have ideas of whether and how technologies could be democratized? What actions for nature are currently not being recognized? How we can ‘count’ what is currently unseen and unquantified?
We’re here to learn about your research, the technologies you use, and whether a reversed gaze would be relevant or useful to your work. To keep things festive, we’ll have delicious food and wine to support an open forum for frank discussion. Like it? Don’t? Tell us what you think and how your own work sits within this.
Agenda
Introduce the reverse gaze concept and research team
Discuss through prompt questions
Design a reversed gaze study + repurposed tech to answer it
Lunch included. Drop ins welcome.
