“… imagination not only shapes the perception of the climate change but co-fabricates it in ways that affect the possibilities to act on it.”
Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys, Climate Change and the Imagination.
We are faced with many ‘wicked’ environmental problems —from the climate crisis to biodiversity declines to emerging infectious diseases— which are interrelated and go beyond traditional scientific fields. The complexity and range of climate change’s impacts make interdisciplinarity one of the most powerful ways to respond to our current predicament. The complexity and range of climate change’s impacts make interdisciplinarity one of the most powerful ways to respond to our current predicament.
To tackle these challenges, scientists need to engage with those outside their field or profession. However, scientists are generally poorly-equipped to do this and there are few places for this to happen within institutions. Going further, when required to speak to broad audiences about their work, a lack of interdisciplinary context often compounds the difficulty to engage with the public or policy-makers. Research that could have broader application or appeal to more than a small field of experts often gets misunderstood or overlooked because of this. Knowledge translation is already an identified gap in many research institutes.
The following cross-disciplinary conversations were organized through the University of Guelph’s experimental institute, The Guelph Institute for Environmental Research (GIER).
The Climate Emergency
Climate change is one of the first environmental challenges to impact every single person on the planet. We brought together three experts with different backgrounds to have an interdisciplinary discussion around the climate emergency.
Human Behaviour and Climate Change
In collaboration with the The EchoNetwork, we invited Dr. Tongzhe Li (UofG, Canada) and Ajay Raghavan (Initiative for Climate Action, India) to discuss how individual behaviours and motivations, as well as social norms, can shape our present and future.
COVID-19, the Environment, and You
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to dramatically change our behaviour, with important ripple effects on our environment. These changes might help us imagine new futures, presenting us with new lessons to be learned about our relationship with the environment.
Diverse Perspectives on Knowledge Mobilization
A disconnect between arts and science and a lack of engagement jeopardize our capacity to collaboratively respond to environmental crises in a creative, innovative, and equitable way. This webinar brings fresh and novel perspectives on knowledge mobilization to enrich environmental conversations.
The following cross-disciplinary conversations were organized through the Imagining Climates Project, organized through the University of Guelph’s GIER Small Grants Program. In recognition of the variety of expertise that the University of Guelph has to offer, Imagining Climates hosted a series of conversations pairing leading thinkers and creators from the University of Guelph’s Environmental Science and Arts communities to discuss the role of the imagination in their practice as they engage with ecological and climate crisis.
Catherine Bush and Liane Miedema Brown
A discussion of the conceptual origins of the Imagining Climates project and how arts and science can work together to deepen our understanding of our present environments in order to respond to and reframe our future.
Diane Borsato and Chris Earley
A discussion of birds, bird feeding as a form of performance art, and the intersections between art-making and science as they explore the imaginative possibilities for responding to our current moment.
Amanda Boetzkes and Karine Gagné
A discussion of ice and the role of the imagination in their work tackling climate change.