Reimagining Critical Responses to Anthropocene Challenges: An Interdisciplinary Approach

The project seeks to bring together artists, policy experts, journalists and academics in an exploratory lab, in order to interrogate and measure how the intersection of art, policy, and academia can generate impactful interdisciplinary alternatives to address the challenges of climate change. The project will be centred on the organisation of an interdisciplinary workshop aimed at an informed analysis of the state of the current planetary crisis, with emphasis on how it affects human societies, non-human ecologies and material environments at different intensities. Whilst questioning techno-optimistic geoengineering solutions, the workshop will aim to produce alternative ways of facing these challenges by exploring the intersection of sensitivities coming from the arts, the policy-world, media, and academic circles.
The workshop will, in the first instance, produce a report collecting the main proposed interventions derived from the workshop discussions; these will then be presented to the participants alongside a survey to assess whether interdisciplinary discussions affected their process of viewing the crisis or the manner of producing responses to it. Furthermore, the report’s suggestions will be disseminated and publicised across social media, alongside a public-facing survey form to maximise the project’s outreach and assess the preliminary impact of interdisciplinary interventions. The workshop builds on a significant amount of high-quality research on the topic of the Anthropocene, authored by the proposed co-investigators. At the same time, the opening of this new dialogue will also benefit them by providing them with valuable interdisciplinary feedback on their own ongoing research. In the long term, the
workshop is envisioned by the UH organising team as the seed for a potential next larger impact collaborative project based on a critical view on the management of Anthropocene challenges, for example an art exhibition.
In sum, the workshop would generate impact in two significant ways. On the one hand, the workshop would enable the set-up of an exploratory lab which will open up the possibility for a new conversation conducive to the designing, materialisation and voicing of a new approach to acting in the Anthropocene, one which enhances the production of policy initiatives sensitised with the limits of mainstream techno-optimist positions to tackle environmental challenges. On the other hand, the workshop will also contribute to the creation of a large interdisciplinary network with great disseminating potential, particularly through spaces outside academia. The workshop’s follow-up outreach and survey activities aim to measure the impact of such an experimental cross-disciplinary policy exercise, through interrogation of both participants and recipients publics.