Online webinar / 11am, 12 December 2024
Join Dr Jen Clarke as she reflects on creative public engagement and interdisciplinary research within our Agroforestry Futures Project. Jen’s working group integrated artistic and anthropological methods to explore new ways of understanding and imagining future landscapes, emphasising the role of embodied experience and creative practices in fostering meaningful connections to place.
The team engaged in collaborative and participatory methods including filmmaking and collage-making as well as embodied practices such as breathwork, shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), and walking. They combined these approaches with archival investigations and youth workshops to reimagine agroforestry futures. The insights gained reach beyond traditional textual or observational research modes.
Theoretically, this work is inspired by feminist new materialism, which emphasises the interconnectedness of bodies and landscapes, and allows us to attend to questions around temporalities and scale. This webinar will propose the material and perceptual complexities of image-making as a metaphor for navigating ecological uncertainty. These frameworks inform the emphasis on the poetic and sensory dimensions of public engagement, challenging reductive notions of environmental stewardship as solely technical or scientific.
Foregrounding the importance of embodied knowledge in shaping ethical and social relations within landscape design, planning, and management, Jen will argue that creative and experiential practices are integral to imagining and building sustainable, equitable futures. This work package within our Agroforestry Futures Project contributes to a broader rethinking of sustainability, shifting from the politics of knowledge to the poetics of feeling, and advocating for creative practices as central to ecological and social transformation.
Presenter
Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Clarke, Associate Professor at Gray’s School of Art, specialises in contemporary art, anthropology, and ecology. With a feminist lens, her work addresses social and ecological concerns in the UK and Japan. She leads interdisciplinary research and international art projects and chairs the Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s Board of Directors.
濁ったイメージ、
想像された未来の風景、
アートが新しい未来を形作る。
Turbid images,
Future landscapes imagined,
Art shapes new futures.
