Experiments in Place-based Environmental Research and Creative Practice
This roundtable will introduce works-in-progress from Blue Lab core team members.
Introducing several current projects, the roundtable will discuss our approaches to place-based environmental research and creative practice. The guiding question for our shared work, which will structure the discussion, is how climate change and other planetary crises are being lived in real-time and how different communities imagine livable futures for the places they know, value and call home. Each collaboration involves the development of a public story series or body of creative work along with ongoing research about the methods, challenges and impacts of the projects themselves.
The roundtable participants-which include the lab's academic and creative leadership as well as undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars-are a multidisciplinary group. Our expertise includes: coral archives of earth history, environmental histories of mining, experimental ecopoetics, environmental narrative, interactive design, multispecies ethnography, public writing, social-environmental documentary and groundwater modeling. For this proposed session, each participant will deliver a short presentation on a Blue Lab project they are leading or co-leading that introduces the project's animating idea or question, its interlocutors and collaborators and its approach to research-driven environmental art and storytelling.
Through a conversation facilitated by the session chair, we will reflect on both future directions and pressing challenges. We also will allow ample time for conversation with the audience, which we hope will include members of kindred groups and centers at other institutions that have been leading the way in developing the public environmental humanities and participatory environmental studies.