On 6 October 2021 our creatures Lara Houston, Ann Light & Kat Braybrooke present at the annual meeting of Society for Social Studies of Science, under the session Un/Making a Difference 1: materialities, textiles, making, mending & inventing. Abstract is available below.
Transformational Creative Practices: Interventions Towards Sustainable Futures
Due to ecological breakdown and the climate crisis we urgently need to find new ways of living within the earthâs limits. In pilot research Light et al. (2018) find that creative practitioners â including artists, curators, designers and citizen-led collectives â are creating a range of transformative interventions that change participantsâ orientation to the world, their sense of agency and sense of potential. Creative practitioners are catalysing change by gathering publics around issues that matter to them in a variety of domains, and using a range of aesthetic, affect-driven, playful and participatory interventions that have multi-layered impacts across a range of scales.
Our presentation explores the qualities of this category of âtransformative creative practiceâ (Light et al., 2018) and how these un/making practices contribute to the everyday acts of imagining and crafting arrangements for more liveable worlds. Despite reports of a âcrisis of imaginationâ in the stories we tell about climate change (Ghosh, 2016; Morton, 2013) our empirical work finds adaptive organisations, that are creating expanding and tentacular multi-layered practices that enrol multiple publics, often moving towards expanded imaginaries via mundane steps â engaging hesitancy, improvisation and speculation in compelling forms of âmaterial participationâ (Marres, 2012).
See more in the conference programme: LINK