The AHRC network’s two Cardiff Philosophy Café events featured the topic of creativity and posed questions about the significance of emotions as part of our intellectual and contemporary social lives, especially, their role in understanding future uncertainty. The two Cardiff cafés were intended to build on the first event that took place in Aberystwyth where the primary focus was on the arts, and on exploring the aesthetics of arts performances and artworks as a means of making sense of sustainability.
The introduction to the July 16th café suggested that the evening’s event provided a space to think about what comes next, and for thinking about our feelings about the future: for these reasons, it can be useful to have uncertainty. On the other hand, the session’s focus on uncertainty might highlight feelings such and anger, fear and apathy if, for example, societal change robs people from their sense of security: such experiences might also go on to prompt identification with other people in the same situation thereby generating a counter narrative to the one about uncertainty bringing fear.
The three 10-15 minute contributions from each of three speakers/performers from the arts community (Simon Whitehead, Fern Smith, and Gareth Clark) then followed, so that café participants had a brief encounter with how each one drew on the arts and their specific involvements in environmental and community sustainability.
Simon Whitehead performed the last 10 minutes of a dance that involved keeping a table in motion by spinning it on one of its legs for the duration of his “performance on gestures”. He described himself as “functioning to be a sensory element for humankind and bringing together the changing elements of ecology he felt”. One of his concerns was with the creation of environmental movement and formative routes towards sustainable futures. Spiralling emotions, moment to moment reflections, gesturing towards growth, narratives about transformed relationships with self and place, and anticipating unstable futures all featured.
Fern Smith started b
y explaining how, for her, a creative response requires avoiding the compulsion to speak in a certain fashion about uncertainty. She then went on to speak about her experiences of leading the Volcano theatre company, of how speaking differs from performance which is “being in relationship with people in the here and now”, how fear and shame are “the two Ronnies of emotion” that you cannot do without, how openness is important in allowing something to flow through you, and uncertainty can be a “comfortable no-where place” – as she is now experiencing in a welcome pause before further developing her work that seek to promote creative practice for a sustainable future (through the Emergence project). Gareth Clarke spoke of his ongoing work in community theatre in Newport at a time of socio-economic difficulty and uncertainty and where the future is open to be shaped. But, while he has been “seeking defiance”, he has been able to find very little. His theatre tableaus in public places asked audiences “what did they want to put on the policy-making agenda” but had resulted in people saying nothing, suggesting that it is important to think more about the public’s difficulty in articulating any demands they may have.
After the three presentations, members of the audience were asked to explore at their tables emotional aspects of their relationship to the future. As a further resource for their discussions each speaker/performer provided a guiding question.
What emotions keep you spiralling? How do they relate to uncertainty?
How can we imagine a better future when the present seems so bleak?
What is the relationship between uncertainty and trust, and how does this relationship make itself manifest?
If you go to the Philosophy café blog you will see some slides reporting comments from the audience café discussions, along with some careful reflections on the event that were prompted by the introduction and artists’ presentations. These reflections focus specifically on different narratives involving uncertainty and the future as a source of strong emotions (both positive and negative) and lead to a problematisation of feelings of hope. A key proposition arising was that the best way to shape the future might be “to live in the moment”.
Further reflections following through themes from the Aberystwyth event into the Cardiff café events appear below.
Evocative settings, artworks’ obliqueness and sensate, experiential knowledge
At the network’s initial event in Aberystwyth, the mix of performances, talks, and discussions were set up to consider how artworks can work obliquely to create relationships between place, sustainability and the body, and to ask whether there is a difference between engaging with materiality (e.g. of the body and place) as opposed to representing it. Panel discussions involved academics (arts scholars and social scientists) and artists, and the session in Café style involved the audience in discussions similar in kind to those that take place regularly at the Cardiff Philosophy Café, although they were conducted in a rather differently shaped (i.e. round), bare-boarded and empty space that typically would be used for dance and performance. This was an evocative setting for participants to talk about issues tied up with the disclosure of sense-based, experiential knowledge, its significance to sustainability practice and sustainable place making, and how to engage with questions about environmental risk and futures.
At the first Cardiff Philosophy café, another (not incompatible) role was forcibly suggested for the arts – in fictionalising positive stories, and inspiring fictional space. In relation to practicing sustainability and envisaging futures, this suggestion can be understood as arising out of a now pervasive discursive regime that sometimes brings the arts and social sciences together. A key element of this regime is echoed in the written preamble to the café: that there is something potentially troubling and disabling about predicating climate change scenarios and environmental futures from worst case scenarios and visions of a landscape of destruction. If there is a positive, inspirational role for the arts, then an alternative approach is available to asking people to frame their futures through the lens of negative future scenarios.
At the same time, the invitation extended directly to the audience at the 16th July event had an investigative, social science element in that people were asked to “consider what aspects of the future are most uncertain and the emotions they evoke in us”. In responding to this request, for some in the audience it seemed equally important to speak of threat to the place where one lives as a source of fear. This occasion of speaking about threat and fear appeared as a prelude to telling a related – possibly the main – story about how there was a lack of concern for publicising positive stories in the media (about communities in the Valleys showing themselves to have positive self-regard and resilience) because of the media’s favoured preoccupation with sensationalism. Thus, emotional content can arise out of different interpretive circuits involving stories which marshal evidence in support of facts, and the rhetoric through which they are articulated. Through these interpretive circuits, futures can take on a kind of effective reality here in the present, shaping people’s sense of what is possible and desirable. Fear, hope and anxiety may enhance or erode identity, agency and the power to act, and they can come together in the telling of a multifaceted (as opposed to a singular) situated, contextual, community-wide story or sense-making narrative.
Engagement with and through the arts & performance: What forms of attentiveness and awareness are set in motion? Issues arising for environmental social scientists, policy-making and science-public communication
Social scientists attending the Aberystwyth event experienced – and were subsequently able to reflect with their arts colleagues – on the forms of attentiveness and awareness that can be set in motion by arts encounters of the kind that they had seen. These encounters had involved a focus on practices and routines of environmental stewardship and their aesthetic appreciation (Jony Easterby); evoked and imagined connections with ancient features of the landscape and their temporal resonances (Jane Lloyd Francis); and sensuous encounters with the everyday environments in which we live and places where we feel at home (Simon Whitehead). But we were also left thinking about the sorts of understanding that we should be seeking, and what they could illuminate about the kinds of processes that we had witnessed and participated in? How might it possible to grasp their generative insights –and might it be necessary to allow for a period of time to elapse before doing this?
Did attending the event leave us in a better place in terms of understanding collaborations involving the arts? How should we take into account the array of scientific, socio-economic, and cultural forms of world-making and policy-making discourses in which contemporary arts and social science practices are situated, and that include the insistent demand for evidence in support of claims for arts based sustainability practices? The demand for an evidence-base for arts practice might seem to be the dominant voice of policy-making that leads to a closing down of the generative potentials of the arts and various turns (post-modernist/narrative and materialist-discursive) turns in the social science. But our network is premised on the belief that there are more creative ways of interpreting this demand and avoiding what (some) artists might construe as the dead hand of policy-making for sustainability practice. Our central motif, and approach of studying sensing and sense-making, is intended to open up a more creative, collaborative spaces for contemplation and reflection where evidence and creativity can co-exist and strengthen one another’s interpretive capacities and research horizons.
Another apparent impasse arose out of the Aberystwyth event when it was suggested that, for social scientists, artistic work is merely a handmaiden to the work of environmental science and science communication. This is not the position advanced by this AHRC network. Rather our approach is aligned with the argument against simply reducing policy discussions to ones about how to convince the public about the facts of climate chaos arising from anthropogenic causes of climate, tipping points etc. This is known as the deficit model of public-science communication. The deficit model fails in its own goal of engaging publics whose concerns are necessarily with making sense of scientific knowledge in terms of how far it corresponds with their own pre-existing frameworks of understanding; their immediate, practical concerns about how it is possible for them to live in the world; their value, identities and relationships with others; the possible environmental futures they envisage; the kinds of ethical, political and socio-cultural judgements they will find themselves having to make whenever they are confronted with making intelligible any particular scientific case.
This position highlighting the complexities and mediations involved in science-public communication issues aligns us with the interpretive study of risk issues including environmental degradation, socio-technical hazards and climate change (see e.g. Henwood et al, 2010; Pidgeon et al, 2006). Informed by the aforementioned interpretive tradition in social science research on risk and the environment, our network’s concerns prioritise the need for scientists to understand members of the public and what matters to them, not just to teach them to learn the lessons from science (Pidgeon and Fischhoff, 2011). Yet this raises questions about how to engage with publics. Is provocation important? If so, what form should it take? Do publics need to be engaged in ways that have regard for people’s concern to be shown consideration and dignity by others, experts and other external authorities (see e.g. Sayer, 2011). Are the two concerns – provocation and showing concern for people’s concern for dignity – in opposition?
We are also aware that many ecological writers do attach importance to the arts being able to harness scientific knowledge of climate change and environmental degradation in their own work. Ideally, then, the work of this social science-arts collaboration would help with working through what this might mean.
References
Henwood, Karen; Pidgeon, Nick; Parkhill, Karen & Simmons, Peter (2010). Researching Risk: Narrative, Biography, Subjectivity [43 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum:Qualitative Social Research, 11(1), Art. 20. Reprinted in Historical Social Research, 2011, 36 (4).
Pidgeon, N., Simmons, P. and Henwood, K.L. (2006) “Environment, technology and risk”. In P. Taylor Gooby (ed) Perspectives in Risk Research Oxford: OUP.
Pidgeon, N. F. & Fischhoff, B. (2011) The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks. Nature Climate Change, 1, 35-41
Sayer, A. (2011) Why Things Matters to People : Science, Values and Ethical Life Cambridge: CUP