By fostering long-lasting individual and communal connections can you elicit care for and engagement with the River Avon? Against a backdrop of catastrophic river health in Britain, this project seeks to enrich, deepen and transform Bristolians’ perceptions of their local river, with the aim of recentring the river’s place in the public imagination.
Ideas Exchange 2024/25 The project will bring together academics, artists, and filmmakers to deepen our understanding of the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of disasters, as well as the mediating and healing functions of community-based and artistic practices.
How does a qualitative, embodied approach to understanding/knowing water can be explored alongside the quantitative environmental data? How can we imagine and (re)-story water / rivers? What would a caring policy towards water look like? Is there a new space for policy within this affective domain between bodies and rivers?
How have different disciplines and creative practices approached the multiple temporalities of the Anthropocene? What creative techniques can we use to engage students and publics with the challenges of planetary environmental change?
How can researchers explore Caribbean storytelling and folklore as a social act of human self-possession, a means of sharing experiences, and a mode of affirming values? How have these storytellings been captured in archives and how are they told today?
Could rocks and samples held in geological collections, their associated histories and related indigenous worldviews help us all begin to understand more fully our relationships with the land and our planet, our past and global future, our cultural and natural heritage?
What can be learned from the way that Caribbean people tell stories and how this practice has evolved? How might we preserve these stories for wider audiences? And what is the most effective way to re-tell these stories in alternative formats for digital, potentially younger, audiences?
How does the concept of Peasant Popular Feminism influence socio-political roles within regional peasant organisations? How does it support women farmers in agroecological transitions? And how does it connect to peace-building?
How can people living in Britain today be supported to relearn interdependence with land? What is the role of humans as keystone species in landscapes? What does ‘indigeneity’ mean to different communities with different histories of relationship with land? And how do we ‘relearn’ practices of dwelling in and with land?
How will the Global North's net-zero 2050 transformations negatively affect communities in the global south? How can an international research group be established to begin exploration of this imminent issue?
What is possible in relation to living well with our clothing and environment? How can underground (and often marginalised) networks and communities offer knowledge and examples of sustainable washing practices?
How can we co-create knowledge with plants? How can academic researchers and art practitioners collaborate to consider practice-based approaches to studying plants?
How does a perspective on the body as a living archive of intergenerational memories inform approaches to migration and memory? How can an embodied and creative approach to ‘memory work’ help uncover, archive, and work through such memories? And how can this type of ‘memory work’ help migrants themselves redefine a sense of identity to live a better life?
What kind of future ethics will we have for living well with plants? How can technologically mediated encounters with plants be done ethically and sustainably? Will the future of space exploration require us to learn to live well with plants in novel ways?
What are women’s concerns and questions when contemplating motherhood in the climate crisis? What methods are effective in facilitating non-judgemental dialogue between women who have made different reproduction choices?
What are young peoples views on the constructions of gender within the school environment? How do these manifest themselves in everyday interactions with teachers and peers?
How do creative processes support mathematics teachers in becoming curriculum-makers in relation to issues of climate justice? In what ways do mathematics teachers reimagine their own classrooms in relation to issues of climate justice? What curriculum materials and resources do mathematics teachers make based on these imaginings?
How can space be made for meaningful interaction between the participants on how to optimise human-seal relations?
How can community creativity centering on communal gardening in St Pauls contribute to unmooring “traditional” Environmentalism from its white supremacist origins and on-going entrapping?
What are the final steps required to conduct a comparative analysis of the relationship between memory work and political protest in twenty-first century Latin America?
Can we imagine a time when we take responsibility for the health of our water systems? What might an arts practice look like as a result of this speculative dialogue?
In what ways can analysis of nocturnal human-environment entanglements of the River Erme reveal new insights about the contested futures of our rivers?
How can we write narratives of hope in the face of this unfolding disaster? What stories will help prepare us and our children to navigate this crisis?
How can children from diverse backgrounds communicate their connection with nature and biodiversity through art? In what ways are nature-based spaces important for children’s wellbeing? What are the diverse experiences of nature that children across the city experience?
How can an web browser plug in best support fashion activists to find and share information which will be useful to other consumers as well?
How does ecological literacy affect the ability of humans to comprehend and interact with current crises? How does access to land affect the uptake of agroecology in the South West? What are the deep-set beliefs and behaviours of farmers and academics preventing our food system from making an agroecological transition? What is the role of collaborative processes in supporting and promoting agroecological systems?
How have people experienced access to the cities’ streets, thoroughfares, and green spaces during the pandemic? What’s different between Bristol and Bordeaux? What commonalities are there? And how do people experience different forms of lockdown?
How can teachers be enabled to collaborate together at scale as researchers? What barriers and opportunities exist for teachers and academics in the South-West/Wales to collaboratively develop a methodology for teachers to collect data on climate change within their schools?
How can culture, creativity and ‘critical making’ can promote better critical understanding of temporality in the Anthropocene?
How can we support young entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Bristol to support new ventures through international collaboration? And how do we develop effective strategies and tools to bring international groups of young people together to collaborate?
How can artists and researchers come together to create visualisations of injustice and resistance in contemporary food systems with the goal to explore disparities, inequalities, and the social/environmental problems inherent in industrialised food systems?
What causes us to experience temperatures differently? How can researchers facilitate an exploration of human experience of rising temperatures?
How can we explore the creative processes behind our different voices? Can the popular media of podcasts and short films assist the political process of constitution-making? How can we tell the history of Chile’s social movements from the perspective of the objects that shaped them?
What are the forces that shape the structure our cities? How do pollution and slums impact urban development in the long run?
How can you source and generate content from languages and stories underserved by the wider publishing industry?
How can you design a project that incorporates humanities from the outset? Can ‘Blue Humanities’ refining or re-framing scientific research questions?
By visualising the sounds of marine wildlife and the way they are impacted by underwater noise pollution, can we draw attention to an otherwise invisible challenge?
How do communities define, measure and experience wellbeing and resilience? How do community-owned spaces contribute to these characteristics? How can community-led regeneration thrive without being co-opted by commercial interests?
Can digital tech empower online consumers to respond to environmental emergencies? Can we create a tool that can connect with consumer practices to give people the opportunity to make ethical consumer choices?
How can the NGO PHASE update its central 'Theory of Change' to respond to the developments of the organisation and the communities they assist?
In emergency flood disasters, what information is needed from scientists? How should data be presented and within what timeframe?
What is the value of local parks in lifting the wellbeing of local communities? How do communities relate to their green spaces?
How can researchers re-examine the relationship between global issues of agriculture-driven deforestation, poverty and unsustainable development?
What support do young people of diverse backgrounds need to deal with the climate and ecological emergency in their own way? What types of knowledge and understanding young people feel they need in order to better deal with the issue, how they prefer to learn about these topics, and how the arts can facilitate this process?
How can traditional farming techniques, honed over millennia, help enable substantial and sustainable increases in global access to food?
Can animation be used as a research method to examine global challenges? Can animation be applied to promote forms of development?
What can be learned from a one-day conversation between academics, creatives, and city-council representatives based between the two cities with parallel histories?
How can a radical and interdisciplinary team come together to further develop their work on non-visual senses and environment?
What are Bristol Somali refugees’ experiences of journeys from adversity to resilience, from isolation to connectedness, and from constraining to facilitating environments? How might video narratives contribute to understanding and action to improve the opportunities for pre-school children in refugee families?
Can university students' awareness and understanding of global citizenship be promoted through intercultural encounters with students from other universities?
How are migration and migrants/refugees represented in the media? How can we improve public conversations about migration from the grassroots up?
How can experimental film be used to address the global decline in flying insects and the loss of bees and biodiversity?
How can researchers come together to explore the use of Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) technology to utilise waste in innovative ways?
What would be needed to live on Mars?
Can we address themes such as sustainability, conservation, multispecies relationships, maritime history and ‘ocean blindness’, to define new ocean pedagogies that can empower learners to create positive change?
How might bringing together artists, scientists and researchers in the humanities with shared interests, generate insights into a shared language for research and creative practice? How can we better communicate risk levels associated with ground movement?
How might live performance offer an interactive and unconventional way to explore how human living might transform when significant environmental change occurs? What role does technology play in that transformation?
How can art be employed to offer materiality and image to the seas and oceans which increasingly occupy and invisible and non-tangible space in the public imagination?
What does ‘eating well’ mean in the context of killing animals for food? What can a cultural approach can bring to animal welfare assessment?
What makes a place special and unique? What causes people to fall in love with an environment?
Digital Storytelling for Anyone’s Child brings together a historian with a creative technologist and a charitable thinktank to experiment with new interfaces for cross-continental digital storytelling about the human costs of the global drugs war in Mexico.
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