As part of the concluding phase of Murmurations, the SSHRC Connection Grant (2022), chore-OKRA-tic ecologies is a research exposition on the publishing platform Research Catalogue that documents Dramaturgical Ecologies' encounter with okra—a plant of West African origin widely consumed by diasporic communities around the world.

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This research layers somatic, audiovisual, and textual approaches to explore how okra can serve as a diagrammatic technique: a way to stage co-relational forms of existence within the Dramaturgical Ecologies research group. Rather than a metaphor, okra becomes a living diagram, opening up new ways of understanding the intersection of dramaturgy and Blackness, and emphasizing the generative excess that arises from this encounter.

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The act of cooking okra, in this context, is not solely about culinary practice, but about what emerges through the entangled relations between the plant, the body, and thought. It becomes a practice through which the researchers can attune to shared techniques of existence in relation to place, history, and one another. As a diagram, okra offers a non-representational form of relationality, aligning with Erin Manning’s assertion that “what the procedure of a diagrammatic praxis ... can do is make felt the processual nature of space in-forming for experience” (Manning, 2013). In this spirit, chore-OKRA-tic ecologies foregrounds “the complexity of experience's passing, taking special aim on the ‘critical’ moments” (Massumi, 2011), offering a unique form of diagrammatic attunement that is both epistemological and ontopoethical.