Our network aims to:

• Enable social scientists, arts scholars and artists to work together to foster intellectually and culturally creative work – also involving people and communities – on ways of making sense of uncertainties, ambiguities, dangers and risks posed by natural resource depletion, climate change and environmental transformation
• Elucidate contested meanings of sustainability (including sustainable energy), and consider how ‘sustainability’ operates as a set of scientific, political, ethical and arts discourses
• Explore how  and why arts scholars, and artists who are producing and performing works on the theme of sustainability, promote awareness of the importance of the aesthetic value of those artworks
• Develop cross-disciplinary ways of working so that artists, arts scholars and social scientists can envisage and promote generative, future-oriented actions and activities that are capable of contributing to more sustainable lives and place-making.

Our Inquiries

Two of the main foci of our investigation are sensing and sense-making about risk, home and place, and diversity in sustainability discourse. A central theme is experiences of ‘being at home’, as such experiences are fore-grounded within some contemporary performance arts scholarship. This research suggests that transformations in ecological knowing are encouraged by imaginative attentiveness to the place where one lives, particularly the everyday surroundings that are most tangible to people. Thus, movement towards sustainability is seen as grounded in a form of ecological awareness made possible by our experiences of “being at home”. Yet scholars in this field also accept that ‘home’ (as a concept) and ‘homing’ (as a practice) need to be interrogated and rethought.

Interpretive social sciences make available approaches and methods for extended study of what home and locality means to people when studied close up. These allow researchers to acknowledge the challenges associated with taking into account the kinds of affective, semiotic and social flows that characteristically occur across and around occasions of practical, everyday sense making.  Such work involves asking questions about embodied and sensate processes of homing and place-making in a way that introduces spatial and temporal complexity. These forms of complexity tend to be obscured in our social routines and daily practices while helping to create, fragment and mobilise forms of environmental subjectivity.

Interpretive social scientists working on environmental futures turn the spotlight onto ways of remembering and expecting that actively endure in time, and on narratives (e.g. of care, attachment and security) that might provide people and communities with meaningful and affective connections linking place and identity together. They seek to understand the difficulties of creating and sustaining action-enabling connections at different temporal and spatial scales.

Planned Outcomes

With these intellectual routes into our subject, and through the collaborative activities of the network (initially over the course of one year), we are opening out ways of thinking about processes of sensing and sense-making in relation to environmental risk. In addition we are building understanding of the principles and practices of sustainability practice and sustainable place-making.

Scheduled Activities

We are currently running set of academic development and public engagement activities over the course of one year (February 2013-January 2014).  These events are designed to promote dialogue on the theme of environmental futures.