‘Turbulence / Emergence / Enchantment: A Compendium of Climate Literacies’ took place at Cove Park between 4-7 November 2021. It brought together artists, writers, performers, academics, and activists from a wide range of backgrounds to discuss climate literacy. A digital archive of this symposium is available on Cove Park’s website.
In addition to attending this event, representatives from all the organisations involved in NAARCA had the opportunity to meet in person for the first time.
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
In the Western tradition, language has been viewed as our most powerful tool for ordering and mastering the world around us. And yet more and more we are having to acknowledge our struggle in communicating the current environmental crisis and its unequally distributed effects.
How do language and action relate to each other in climate science, narrative and activism? How can we rethink our responses to classical and premodern legacies of environmental thinking to create new understandings for the present? How can we open ourselves to new kinds of environmental literacies that give space to the agency of the other-than-human and more-than-human worlds? How do we ensure that languages have an impact on global discourse, in a context where the privilege of climate speech is still dominated by the elite discourses of the Global North?
This experimental intensive/symposium aims to answer those questions by gathering together contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds, criss-crossing its way through a series of lectures, performances and film screenings that together ask the question: How can we progress towards mutual literacy between the arts, the humanities, the hard sciences, and civic responsibility?
Turbulence, Emergence, and Enchantment, with their unsettling mix of positive and negative connotations, act as guiding metaphors for the week. Turbulent are climate, geo-politics, and living beings. Emergent is metamorphosis. Enchantment is possibility of participating in the creation of just and environmentally thriving futures.
This symposium was organised in partnership with the Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies and Professor Jason König at the University of St Andrews, London-based curator Lucia Pietroiusti, TBA21-Academy and Markus Reymann, and the School of Classics and the College of Arts and Humanities (Environmental Humanities Research Strand) of University College Dublin and Dr. Giacomo Savani. The symposium was made possible by funding from Arts & Business Scotland: Culture & Business Fund.