"Plural Europe: Culture, Climate Crisis" a winner for SELCS in 'European Voices' competition

A collaborative project between SELCS academics Florian Mussgnug, Helene Neveu Kringelbach and Ana Claudia Surian Da Silva, "Plural Europe: Culture, Climate Crisis" will be supported by UCL Grand Challenges Cultural Understanding and by the UCL Cities partnerships Programme.

The project will host a series of public events with internationally distinguished writers from Denmark, France, Romania, Italy, China, Brazil and the UK, to take place between May and October 2020. Situating ourselves amid the polyphonic and multicultural plurality of Twenty-First Century Europe, our speakers will turn their attention to the systemic “slow violence” of economic and environmental globalization, and its potentially catastrophic effects on human communities and more-than-human habitats: mass migration and forced immobility, resource depletion, social collapse. Each reading and conversation will be accompanied by small-group workshops and symposia with researchers from across UCL and beyond, and interviews with be made available as videocasts.

The project confirms UCL as an important home of practice-led and creative critical inquiry, in view of the imminent launch of UCL’s new multidisciplinary BA Creative Humanities. Speakers will include the novelists and poets Carmen Bugan, Maggie Gee, Liz Jensen, Ana Maria Machado and Laura Pugno, among others.