CFP: Is hope radical? Creative methods, experimental politics and diverse adventures in living through environmental change

AAG 2015 Chicago

Anja Kanngieser, Department of Sociology Goldsmiths, London
Harriet Hawkins, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London

"The only way to approach such a period [the anthropocene] in which uncertainty is high and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living (Dumanoski 2009,  213 quoting C.S. Holling)

A growing set of responses to environmental, political and social uncertainties, and the multiple challenges they pose, have sought to replace narratives of crisis, dystopia and paranoia, with narratives based on opening out spaces for hope and for possibilities (Gibson-Graham and Rolevink, 2009). Such stances do not seek to downplay dangers, or to absolve responsibilities, but rather to respond affirmatively by experimenting with sets of practices, concepts and methods that are up to the practical, ethical and conceptual challenges of environmental change. These are, or should be, avowedly political projects, cognizant of the highly uneven and differential access to economic, social and ecological resources and securities, promoting the adoption of ways of living and organizing in the ‘age of the anthropocene’ that are “open to what can be learnt and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being”  (Gibson-Graham and Rolevink, 2009). 

Noticeable within these diverse efforts are practices of experimentalism and creativity, whether these are forms of “anticipatory interventions,” “active experimentations”, the assembly of “hybrid research collectives” or calls for “experimental socio-ecological practices” (Lorimer 2012, Johnson and Morehouse, 2014; Gibson-Graham and Rolevink, 2009). These expanded senses of experimentation redistribute the sites, spaces, efforts and subjects of environmental science beyond the academy and the laboratory; to take in interdisciplinary working teams, to rethink expertise by recognizing the value of knowledges other than those of ‘experts’ (including those that are resolutely non-human), and to make space for seeing and hearing myriad agencies constituting the collective ecosystem. In this session we seek contributions that explore what it might mean to respond to environmental challenges with a turn to creative, and political, experiments. 

The creative (re)turn within geography of late has seen an expansion of geographical scholarship that takes such practices not only as valued empirical objects, the analysis of which contribute to the discipline’s substantive concerns ( e.g. landscape, environment, nature-culture), but as legitimate research methods and practices. Such practice-based thinking has seen geographers working alone and in collaboration, using techniques of visualization, video-making and photography, audio-geographies of sound recording and sonification, performance, music-making, dance and curation, in attempts to meet a variety of epistemological and ontological questions the discipline is currently facing. We are concerned here with what it might mean to turn to these creative methods to engage with environmental and social precariousness, less as an unqualified celebration of the creative and experimental, but rather as a critical engagement of what is a growing interdisciplinary set of practices.  

We invite contributions that might engage with, but which are certainly not limited to considerations of:

→ critiques of creativity and experimentalisms
→ the potential of creative practices for making space for seeing and hearing often unheard voices and unseen others 
→ creative experiments as political projects
→ creative practices and the challenges of Anthropocene temporalities 
→ asserting the sensory body as a site for thinking through environmental crises
→ creativity and the cultivation of habits of democracy and care
→ creativity and the "un-performing" of dualisms-  e.g. nature/culture
→ creativity and building of alliances across difference
→ creativity and the intervention in the "making" and "unmaking" of natures 

Please send expressions of interest/ questions/ abstracts of ~250 words  to 
[log in to unmask] by 27th  October. 
We will notify people of our decision by 29th October, and for successful papers it will be your responsibility to upload your abstract into the AAG system and get your AAG PIN to us by 3rd November.