Monthly Archives: February 2014

Reflections on the Environmental Futures Dialogue from Tim O’Riordan

Sustainability is not a word but a way of becoming. It defines the unity of being between humans and all other life on Earth. It is the manifestation of 4500 million years of evolution which reveals that it has taken some million years of human existence to recognise. In evolutionary terms the Earth is in its old age, with about one billion years to go. Arguably even if humans genuinely embrace the sustainability perspective it is unlikely that they will exist in any recognisable form in a million years from now. In any case the Earth will become uninhabitable from a dying and expanding sun in 300 million.

We face a century where we either learn to become an integral part of an evolving nature or we will cause great suffering for more than three quarters of our brethren. Over half are afflicted today. Yet our inabilities and insensitivies to change their plight is a reflection of our imperfect humanness.

The Cardiff seminar showed us that it is indeed possible to deploy art and creative expression to address these huge questions. Indeed it may be the case that it is primarily through these expressive media that we can gain the discussion space and intellectual wholeness to re-establish human empathy with present and future generations and all life on Earth.

What I learnt was that challenging films and visual art can offer a very powerful way of approaching the world we would like to see for our children to grow up in. I am a great believer in the art of conversation where younger and older people engage in a learning exchange over what values and ways of living and consuming should be adjusted so that the next generation can live more freely.

If such a set of conversations were to be connected to art and to videos then I feel we could begin to create a basis for genuine transformation of society and politics so as to reclaim democracy and to open up learning into an interactive basis of conversations and progressive dialogues. I would like to think that this process would be led by 16-19 year olds as they are not the “next generation of leaders”. They are the leaders of today.

So I make my plea. Please liberate the creative talent of current young adults and enable them to converse with their next generation to find a common pathway, doubtless of braided rivers joining and separation, but running on a common course, so we can find connecting rivulets through which to share our confidence and learning.

Creating spaces for new thought by risking failure (Karen Henwood)

At this event, it was possible to glimpse something of what the performance arts and environmental and interpretive social science communities can learn from one another by bringing into view their varied intellectual commitments, research approaches and practices. Our network’s efforts at collaboration have been conducted through both communities’ involvement in co-producing events, making reflections publicly available via blog posts after the events, and concern for how it might be possible to find ways of meeting the major environmental challenges of our times i.e. climate change, resource depletion, ecological collapse.

Collaborative working need not necessarily involve blurring boundaries. It may open the door to recognising a plurality of forms of practice, as already recognised by those who seek to historicise the role of the arts and sciences and consider their place in contemporary society. But with pluralisation comes destabilisation: just as the arts can no longer exist in one place of heightened aesthetic awareness (the gallery), so the social sciences cannot assume epistemic privilege as the basis for engaging members of the public in their work. This can be a heady mix as it may mean that the collaborations we are forming involve making connections through feelings of exposure. Other vulnerabilities may be experienced too regarding a possible decentring of each community’s established claims to epistemic and aesthetic value.

Major environmental challenges are complexly mediated by discourses of risk and sustainability. This idea has featured in our advertising leaflets and blogs about previous network events, and in the “keywords and provocations” document circulated to invited speakers prior to their involvement in one of our panel discussion sessions – and which was made available shortly after on this website. These documents point to the ways in which risk and sustainability discourses are constitutive of a shared concern for future uncertainty. In methodological terms, this approach raises questions about fruitful ways of focusing collaborative environmental arts and social science research on the theme of sensing and sense-making about sustainability so that it is possible to find ways of inquiring into the kinds of feelings we may have about future uncertainty. Hence I was surprised by one particular comment that I heard at the event about how the making sense of sustainability network as a whole had skirted around sustainability as an issue.

The first event in Aberystwyth had set up the concerns of the network publicly at the outset, and the aesthetics of sustainability was the most central issue under discussion. Little enthusiasm was expressed at that time about the suggestion (made by a social scientist) that the discourse of sustainability might be one that had been imposed on the arts community. My view is that we would have been misguided in arranging for the Wales Millennium Centre event to feature talks by environmental social scientists on the theme of “what is sustainability” or “why climate change is a risk issue”. This might well have suggested a lack of engagement across disciplines in questions that were raised from within the creative arts community about the importance of communicating obliquely, and the literary practice of reading with the grain. We would have risked going backwards by working to impose external framings of risk and sustainability issues, undermining our efforts to avoid getting stuck in a space that was restricted by a clear directional framing that started from a secure basis in science knowledge and seemingly portrayed a priori truths for consumption by the artsworld. As it was, questions arose in different ways at the event about whether arts and social science communities remain wedded to separate identities, whether a sense of so-much-going-on became a distraction, and what was being performed (anxiety? uncertainty?) in that space?

When seeking to find solutions to intractable problems (such as climate change), this inevitably includes the anxieties and uncertainties arising – or that remain underground – when possible threats to one’s own (and whole species) survival are at stake. The event rose to these challenges by allowing for the abstraction of “a truth from the interactions between humans and space that can give rise to new thought (Lather, 2013, p641; see also Povinelli, 2011). Although not something one would wish to plan into an event of this kind, the presence of feelings of discomfiture can now become a matter for reflection; indeed, potentially, they may be of special interest in respect of our commitment to fostering an atmosphere of hospitality and how that had been carefully designed into our world café-style discussions. For the social science community, it was interesting to learn that there is much to be said in praise of “risking failure”, and to be able to appreciate why this has a place in performance arts practice. If “all beginnings are weak” (a jotting on one of the café tablecloths), we have set ourselves on course to understand disturbances in our own narratives and to go beyond overly insistent demands for consistency of research approach.

Lather, P. (2013) Methodology – 21 what do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26 (6) 634-645