The event, held on Friday the 14th June, at Aberystwyth Art Centre, was a carefully crafted mix of talks and visual presentations by artists about their works, and more extended performances of their works.  Expert panels, along with small round tables and plenary discussions involving the audience, provided opportunities to consider the issues they raised and to try out ways of making sense of them.

Home, place and artworks

There was a clear substantive focus on homing and place at the Aberystwyth event. This focus tended to be a vehicle for articulating the importance of the artworks and the performances of the artists, and their roles in promoting an aesthetics of sustainability.

Many exemplars were forthcoming to show and tell about what such an aesthetics of sustainability can look like as forms of arts practice. They included:

• creative landscaping and site restoration arts projects involving acts of stewardship with a focus on biodiversity and recreation;
• site specific explorations and performances of the beauty and significance of horses and ancient wells –  as community anchors, sensory means of evoking connections to the world around us,  and ways of creating resonances that reach backwards in time;
• dance and spoken word performances about the body, movement and  communication in speech and  language and how they can shape and exemplify new forms of environmental subjectivity and ways of “being at home” in the world.

Discussions of home and place alluded to the importance of cultural specificity and cosmopolitanism: were these notions colliding? Could they be brought together in more creatively productive ways? Were important differences being missed? From a social science point of view, a lot of serious anthropological, sociological and social psychological work exists on these topics already. However, when the language of “multilevel understandings” and “scaling up” from local experiences and knowledges is used as a convenient gloss, this fails to communicate the intractable issues involved.

Sustainability and the postmodern turn in interpretive social science

A lot of energy was directed at discussing the meanings of sustainability. As this interest arose from the audience it supported an earlier decision not to simply jettison the term when publicising the environmental futures events and explaining the work of the network.

Sustainability is not simply a code or message for communicating information. This point was made by way of introduction to the event at the outset to the day, and by drawing upon Wallace Heim’s idea about “reading with the grain”.

Discussions spoke directly to the work of interpretive social scientists who are likewise seeking to develop and utilise reading/compositional strategies: for many, the postmodern turn in interpretive/qualitative social science has been doing just this.

But now we have to confront the post postmodern turn, interests in engaging with questions about materiality have become paramount in environmental studies, and a commitment to studying the non-human has become the latest trend.

Accordingly, there is more to be said on this point than “social scientists are already interested in compositional strategies and developing ways of utilising this creative/arts informed approach as part of their analytical and representational practice”.

The arts and the social sciences: taking forward the collaboration

Developing “environmental humanities” is a vehicle for taking forward arts scholars’ interests in sustainability and for progressing their work. Social scientists involved in arts/humanities collaboration do not simply see the arts being an add-on for communicating social science knowledge (as was suggested at one point).

Such positionings pose interesting questions about how to sustain working across boundaries and disciplinary boundary drawing.

Pursuing ideas about performance is one available route that is already part of postmodern social science. At the Aberystwyth event, Siriol Joyner’s work spoke volumes on this point, as her performance showed ways of mingling words and bodily movements in ways that fused intellect and aesthetics.  If we are to build on this, ways for the arts and humanities to collaborate with environmental science and environmental social sciences warrant further thought.

We will continue to develop our own approach at the Cardiff Philosophy Cafés  though a focus on elicited emotions and opening up spaces for reflection on, and deliberation about, uncertain environmental futures. We intend that these events will offer potential ways of mobilising understandings of sensing and sense making as a central motif for the work of the network.

We have learned from our Aberystwyth event a good deal about aesthetics as a way of thinking about problems of disconnection from self, others and the world, and as offering oblique ways of remaking our worldly connections.

We are aware of the need to move forward by creating useful stories. According to Patti Lather “the most useful stories … are those which interrogate representation, “a reflexive exploration of our own practices of representation” (p. 98). This entails taking a position regarding the contested bodies of thought and practice which shape inquiry …. negotiating the complex heterogeneity of discourses and practices…the ability to establish and maintain an acceptable dialogue with readers about “‘how to go about reality construction'” (Goldknopf, quoted in Conrad 1990, p. 101) … making decisions about which discursive policy to follow, which “regime of truth” to locate one’s work within, which mask of methodology to assume” (1993,  p676).

Lather’s approach can be seen as sitting comfortably with the argument that we should be “reading with the grain” in the way that Wallace Heim suggests. We are interested in ideas such as Siriol Joyner’s about the “imagination and poetry not tampering with the world but moving in it”. Implicitly this troubles the idea of “making an intervention and evaluating the outcomes” which hold fast but are at the over-instrumentalised end of social science practice. She made the intriguing comment “as proved by science, words and imagination create a new object not a mirror of nature….

Questions arising from our reflections on the Aberystwyth event that will provide a backdrop to the Cardiff events  include: How does meaning grow from sensuous encounters? How are feelings such as empathy and forms of attachment involved in environmental sensing and meaning making? Can we collaboratively develop templates that provide new ways of engaging with the world that encourage new environmental subjectivities and new ways of experiencing the world and imagining what is possible for human beings?

We will need to arrive at ways of answering these questions that acknowledge the challenges involved because we are seeking to introduce matters of spatial and temporal complexity (e.g. local and global connections, the multiple temporalities of past-present and future), into the study of homing and sustainable place making that starts with everyday, embodied practices of knowing the world close up.

For a more detailed synopsis and rendering of what happened at this event, visit the Cardiff Philosophy Cafe blog