TY - JOUR

T1 - Arts, sciences and climate change

T2 - practices and politics at the threshold

AU - Gabrys, Jennifer

AU - Yusoff, Kathryn

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called forexpanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the arts–science intersection offer for rethinking on climate change? Which historic conjunctions of arts–sciences are most useful to consider in relation to present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty, contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate change may generate emergent forms of practice that requirenew approaches—not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new thresholds, or ‘meetings and mutations’ that these practices cross. Thresholds—narrated here through the figure of ‘zero degrees’—offer a way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations, uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and relations lead notto fundamental re-definitions or demarcations of arts and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics. Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques Ranciere and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in whichpolitical possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable ‘collective experimentation’ within both creative practices and climate sciences.

AB - Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called forexpanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the arts–science intersection offer for rethinking on climate change? Which historic conjunctions of arts–sciences are most useful to consider in relation to present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty, contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate change may generate emergent forms of practice that requirenew approaches—not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new thresholds, or ‘meetings and mutations’ that these practices cross. Thresholds—narrated here through the figure of ‘zero degrees’—offer a way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations, uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and relations lead notto fundamental re-definitions or demarcations of arts and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics. Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques Ranciere and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in whichpolitical possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable ‘collective experimentation’ within both creative practices and climate sciences.

KW - arts

KW - social practice

KW - Stengers

KW - Ranciere

KW - Interdisciplinary

KW - climate change

KW - Political aesthetics

KW - geography

U2 - 10.1080/09505431.2010.550139

DO - 10.1080/09505431.2010.550139

M3 - Journal article

VL - 21

SP - 1

EP - 24

JO - Science as Culture

JF - Science as Culture

SN - 1470-1189

IS - 1

ER -