The Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) at Goldsmiths, University of London, will explore ‘Ecologies in Practice’ as a research theme for 2021/22, looking at the way arts practice relates to environments and to cultural ecologies (Guattari 2008, Manning and Massumi 2014). The research plan includes the development of a collaboration with Climate Museum UK (CMUK) that will continue into 2022-23. CMUK is a distributed museum, with a mobile hybrid online and moveable collection, and a growing number of associates working creatively to activate international audiences around the Earth crisis of climate change with a focus on diverse participation. We intend to research how interventions in arts practice can enable young people to find their own ways of expressing agency around the issues involved. The practice research activities we are proposing intend to focus young people’s attention on creative responses to biodiversity loss, environmental relation to culture and dialogical nature-based solutions that connect with the needs of different communities. In turn the project will develop shared knowledge of ‘cultural ecologies’ and how culture can create restorative interventions in climate change through the arts and learning.

In early 2021 CMUK conducted research into the views of young people and adults who work with them into how culture should respond to the Earth crisis (CMUK 2021). The report shows that creative approaches and digital culture can be highly engaging for young people, who expressed a desire for ‘inclusive cultural spaces’ where sustainable behaviours are built into extending and effective interventions. Through this grant we intend to develop these cultural ecologies for climate change intervention by bringing together partner organisations with different audiences and practitioners with different artforms. The project will resource young participants with arts methods for engaging peers with climate science evidence, exploring and evaluating potential solutions.

Arts-based participatory research is well-suited for engaging young people with climate change because it provides scope for creative approaches which can be expressed through digital culture starting from the young people’s own social contexts. It is recognised that arts-based methods are particularly effective in widening audience participation in the context of socially-engaged research practice because of the opportunities for collaboration, participation and dialogue (Wang et al. 2017). It has also been recognised that these research methods may offer significant new forms of public engagement with academic research (El Demellawy, Zaman, & Hannes, 2017). We will make opportunities for young people to engage creatively, enabling vocal participation and a high degree of freedom within which to respond, improvise and express themselves, in learning environments that encourage respect for difference and an ethics of care for one another (Atkinson 2018).

We will focus on climate research on ways that we could address biodiversity loss and develop more sustainable ways of nourishing ourselves and the world, exploring local and global food systems and diverse cultural relationships with the Earth’s resources (Jagodzinski 2018, De la Cadena and Blaser eds. 2018). We intend to adapt pedagogies that have already been effective in engaging young people with other topics, to see how these approaches can build Ecologies in Practice.

Currently we are planning to be on-site teaching in the autumn term, however in order to have the capacity to adapt to the changing pandemic restrictions, we have designed a hybrid online/in-person approach. All the practitioners who will work on the project have been teaching and creating workshop events for students during the pandemic, and developing new forms of hybrid digital/material online practice. We will host an event for young people in the Summer term 2022 on the Goldsmiths campus and/or online platforms, to launch this project. There will be launch events for undergraduates and for school students in the Autumn term of 2022-23. A further event will take place with our partner organisation CMUK, to introduce different audiences of young people to the project, in liaison with Goldsmiths school and community connections.

Participants in schools and first year undergraduates will be resourced to carry out further creative responses in their own time and space, so that they can begin to see their own potential for investigative and independent creativity. There will be opportunities to share the processes and outcomes of their activations in response to climate change through digital channels such as Teams. The findings of this project will inform future research developments between Goldsmiths and the Climate Museum. Our evaluations of the proposed range of arts interventions will inform methods of building cultural connections and transitions to university cultures.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31766