Microscope, Telescope, Periscope: An Ecopoetics of Technology

Can we co-opt technological tools to take the house apart and see if there is a cybernetic meadow beneath?

In the context of late capitalism, contemporary ecopoetics often frames technology as antithetical to ecology: destructive, extractive, colonial, toxic, because that is how ‘corporate intelligence’ deploys technology. Microplastics are finding their way into our brains, because we think our human bodies are separate from the planetary body. What if we imagined otherwise? To thrive in a multi-species future, we need to rethink our relationship to ‘technology’. Not as apart from, but as part of, the biosphere.

In this course, we’ll first expand what we might mean by ‘technology’. The engineering of the termite mound; the octopuses’ garden; the ways nonhumans and humans alike manipulate our material surroundings. We’ll look at contemporary ecopoets paying attention to the material reality and damage of contemporary digital and ‘cloud’ technologies, infrastructures and resource extractions: poets such as J.R. Carpenter, Olivia McCannon, and Khairani Barokka.

Throughout this course, we will explore a decolonial ecopoetics with a view to exploring technologies that honour connectedness to land and the longer memories of Indigenous Knowledges (IK), as well as the geopolitics of ‘green technologies’. We will also explore the intersection of queer- and techno-ecopoetics, looking at LGBT+ poets who engage with technologies within and beyond the body in non-normative ways. Inspired by thinkers like James Bridle (Ways of Being: Plants, Animals, Machines – the Search for a Planetary Intelligence), we’ll explore reimagining technologies which might be decentralised, nonbinary, and unknowing. Speculative poetics and worldbuilding will also help us to conjure alternative futures and technologies; thinking-with poets such as Suzannah Evans, science-fiction authors Ursula K Le Guin, Ray Nayler (The Mountain in the Sea), and Ned Beauman (Venomous Lumpsucker).

Inspired by Donna Haraway, you’ll be invited to rethink digital technologies and “make-with” – in sym-poesis – a nonhuman subject, repositioning language as a system that points outward to the world again. We’ll ask what the shared language technologies of humans and spiders might say about the world in which those languages exist; we’ll explore whether it might be possible to co-opt AI in our writing and subvert LLMs through the poetics of prompt-engineering. Throughout the course, we’ll work towards creating a more-than-human poetics of non-binary intelligence, which treats AI in neither a utopian nor dystopian lens, and generate innovative new poetry through active hope, critical tinkering, and punking the tech.

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 23 Jan 2026. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: Bing Image Generator, with Brautigan’s ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ as prompt.

About Caleb Parkin View Profile

Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22. His work explores the connections between environment, gender and identity; the ways we share space with each other and with other species; and the unruly, uncontrollable qualities of what we call Nature.

He’s published three pamphlets: Wasted Rainbow (tall-lighthouse, 2021); The Coin (Broken Sleep, 2022); and collected City Poet commissions, All the Cancelled Parties (2022). His second collection, Mingle (Nine Arches, October 2024) featured in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine. His debut, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize and is translated into Danish.

Caleb’s poems have appeared in The Guardian, The Rialto and numerous other journals. Past commissions include Poetry Society, Lyra Festival, Green Party, National Literacy Trust, Royal British Legion, Royal Albert Memorial Museum Exeter, Sustrans, The Hepworth Wakefield and Bristol Zoo Gardens. He was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please and featured as Radio 3 Breakfast’s Poem of the Week.

Caleb tutors all over the place, for Poetry School, Poetry Society, Arvon, Metanoia Institute, London Lit Lab, and beyond. He has an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes and is a PhD researcher in ecopoetry at University of Exeter with RENEW Biodiversity.

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