Staying with the trouble: Symposium on the critical and creative approaches to the climate and biodiversity crises
Friday 6 Dec 2019
*This event has passed
Our Symposium for 2019 will explore another of our Research Strategy 429 themes, Critical and Creative Landscape Thinking. With a varied group of collaborators (see below), we will form a conversational space to apply this to the climate and biodiversity crises.
The Symposium title is from Staying With the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway (c) 2016, Duke University Press – borrowed with very kind permission!
The rather striking event image is also with kind permission from artist and biologist Brandon Ballengée, and his project, Ghosts of the Gulf – images of species collected in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
We look forward to seeing you there! Buy tickets here; reduced rate tickets are available for students and LRG Members.
Please arrive at 3.45pm for a 4pm start.
Collaborators:
Amanda Thomson is a visual artist, researcher and writer, and lectures at the Glasgow School of Art. Her creative practice is ideas- and research-led and fuses traditional and digital printmaking techniques with photography, bookmaking, video and sound works and creative non-fiction. Her artwork is often about how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world; space, place and landscape; and explorations of home, nativity, migration, mapping and how places come to be made. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature was published by Saraband Books in 2018.
Andrew Patrizio holds the Chair of Scottish Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art. He focusses on two areas: Scottish post-1945 art; and ecological themes and methods. His new monograph The Ecological Eye: Assembling An Ecocritical Art History (Manchester University Press 2019) sets art history in a wider context of non-hierarchical politics, theory and culture. Prior to his academic career, he held curatorial posts at the Hayward Gallery, London and Glasgow Museums.
Anupama Ranawana is a theologian, writer and researcher with research and teaching interests in South Asian Studies, faith and international development, liberation theology, feminist theology, race, ecological justice, feminist political thought and global political economics. Her doctoral work focuses on religious perspectives, specifically Buddhist feminist thought, as an alternative site from which to understand the international. She is presently a Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
George Revill is a musician and Senior Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. He has a long-standing interest in socially engaged art as educational process, geographies of transport and mobility, and geographies of communication, sound, music and auditory spaces. A forthcoming book, Acoustic Geographies, will bring these strands together in an exploration of acoustic geographies of space, place, landscape and environment. George was formerly a Chair of LRG.
Lisa Garforth is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University where her research interests include utopian studies, environmental/Anthropocene futures, and science fiction. Her current focus is on how green futures in fiction, policy, public debate and the sociological imagination are shifting in response to climate change and the Anthropocene, which she explores in her recent book Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature (Polity 2017).
Ruth Little will facilitate the symposium, and works as a theatre and dance dramaturg, a teacher and writer. She lectured in English literature at the University of Sydney, and was literary manager at the Young Vic and the Royal Court. She is dramaturg with Akram Khan Company and has worked with Sadlers Wells, Spitalfields Festival, and the Barbican, amongst other. Ruth was associate director at Cape Farewell from 2010-2016, a project exploring the cultural response to climate change.
In addition:
A group from sensingsite, a collective of experimental arts-based research methods at Central St Martins, facilitated by Susan Trangmar and Steven Ball, is responding to the event themes through excavating landfills along the Thames. They will share their thoughts and findings as part of the symposium.
Vanessa Lastrucci (formerly of the Royal College of Art) is writing a short blog series on the lead up to the event, as thought-pieces to get your teeth into! Read the first blog, “Never inert, nor fixed” and the second, “To care is to change.”