In the Western tradition, language has been viewed as our most powerful tool for ordering and mastering the world around us. And yet more and more we are having to acknowledge our struggle in communicating the current environmental crisis and its unequally distributed effects.
How do language and action relate to each other in climate science, narrative and activism? How can we rethink our responses to classical and premodern legacies of environmental thinking to create new understandings for the present? How can we open ourselves to new kinds of environmental literacies that give space to the agency of the other-than-human and more-than-human worlds? How do we ensure that languages have an impact on global discourse, in a context where the privilege of climate speech is still dominated by the elite discourses of the Global North?
This experimental intensive/symposium aims to answer those questions by gathering together contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds, criss-crossing its way through a series of lectures, performances and film screenings that together ask the question: How can we progress towards mutual literacy between the arts, the humanities, the hard sciences, and civic responsibility?
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