“The River Don has a right to thrive in its own right, because it's alive and it's something we should deeply respect” ~ Dr Joanna Clare Dobson

As part of our Right to Thrive series on the future rights of nature, we speak to a Sheffield-based researcher who explores the relationship between trauma and the living world.

Dr Joanna Clare Dobson is a writer, researcher, artist and allotment-holder based in Sheffield. Her academic work focuses on the role the more-than-human world plays in narratives around trauma, as well as exploring the intersections between grief and nature.

The sudden death of her seven-year-old brother Simon when Joanna was ten was a formative influence on her work, leading her to look at what goes unsaid in moments of deep loss. This is a theme she carries over to her work on nature, particularly the silences that all-too-often surround the destruction of the living world.

We spoke to her back in February as part of our ongoing Right to Thrive series, which is exploring the future rights of nature here in South Yorkshire alongside the River Dôn Project.

Why is it important for you to have a conversation about the River Don?

I’m more of a tree person than a river person. I love rivers, and I've got quite a strong connection to the River Porter where I live, but I would say the way my thinking has developed has more to do with trees. So in terms of a conversation about the River Don, I love what you're doing – I love the whole idea of the Don being alive. There's that Robert Macfarlane book coming, ‘Is a River Alive?’, to which the answer I think is clearly yes.

A key thing about trauma is that it's always about rupture and separation. If we think about the Don in its context, in a bio-region or in an ecosystem, that’s the opposite of separation. That’s about seeing more connection, and being much more relational in the approach. It's important because it can highlight so many connections of which we're unaware, and I think it's important to realise that we live in a culture that tends not to think in terms of connection. On the global stage, what you're seeing is people actually cutting off connection: ‘we need borders, we need to shut out certain beings, human or other than human, who aren't serving our own aims’. That, to me, is the opposite of the kind of thinking you're doing with the River Dôn Project and that we need in order to thrive.

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