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Bringing together scholars from Cities Partnerships Programme in Rome (GEO), Anthropocene, SELCS, Slade, Institute of Global Health, Sustainable Development Goals and Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
Sustainability as Cultural Practice: Verbal and Visual Art, History and the Environmental Humanities
A series of four roundtable events in July 2021, organised in collaboration with the British School at Rome and the British Embassy in Italy. The series will be co-hosted by the newly established Italian Ministry for the Ecological Transition, and will be included in the "All4Climate – Italy 2021" PreCOP26 Programme, promoting 2021 as the Year of Climate Ambition. Bringing together scholars from UCL Cities Partnerships Programme in Rome (GEO), UCL Anthropocene, UCL SELCS, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL Institute of Global Health, UCL Sustainable Development Goals and UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities. All events are open to the public.
Youth, climate advocacy and verbal art: imagining a different future
Friday 2 July 16.00–19.00 CET (15:00-18:00 BST)
Anthony Costello (UCL), Liz Jensen, Sara Marzagora (KCL), Florian Mussgnug (UCL), Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach (UCL) and Aarathi Prasad (UCL)
Climate advocacy and political activism require imagination. In conversation with writer and environmentalist Liz Jensen, British and Italian researchers in literary studies and global health will explore how verbal art can inspire behavioural and policy change on a warming planet, with specific attention to the young.
Coping with climate change in past societies
Friday 9 July 16.00–19.00 CET (15:00-18:00 BST)
John Haldon (Princeton), Christopher Loveluck (Nottingham), John Sabapathy (UCL) and Chris Wickham (BSR; Oxford)
Our panel will consider how humans in different past societies responded to changes in climate, and how they overcame them – or failed to. We need to understand how this worked if we are to understand how to manage the climate crisis. History has lessons here, which technologically more complex contemporary societies need to take into account, and learn from.
Sustainable art practice for a sustainable world
Friday 16 July 16.00–19.00 CET (15:00-18:00 BST)
Susan Collins (UCL), Onya McCausland (UCL), Harriet O’Neill (BSR; RHUL) and Marta Pellerini (BSR)
How can artists flag the importance of political action on climate change? Practitioners, academics and policy-makers from the UK and Italy will discuss the power of art to draw attention to environmental degradation and ask how its production can be both sustainable and engage with wider sustainability initiatives, in relation to communities and place.
Translating climate change
Monday 19 July 16.00–19.00 CET (15:00-18:00 BST)
Andrew Barry (UCL), Kathryn Batchelor (UCL), Anna Lora-Wainwright (Oxford) and Florian Mussgnug (UCL)
Climate change is a global problem, yet our understandings of, for example, environment, crisis, climate, transition, and sustainability differs across languages and cultures. In this panel, we explore these patterns of difference, in policy, science, and everyday discourse, across dominant and minority languages, including the languages of indigenous people.
Organisers
- Professor Florian Mussgnug (Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London).
- Dr Harriet O’Neill (Assistant Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences, British School at Rome; Honorary Research Associate, School of Modern Languages, Royal Holloway, University of London).
- Professor Chris Wickham FBA (Director, British School at Rome; Chichele Professor of Medieval History (Emeritus); Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford).