Call Out Brief: Climate Action and Visual Culture

Can visual culture help us to generate radically different ways to think about climate action? The University of Huddersfield are interested in your propositions on how climate action and visual culture can inform one another and how this interrelationship is represented, documented, and researched.

In an era of rapid rise of urbanisation (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018) and increasing impacts of climate change (IPCC, 2014), we are faced with the greatest threats of irreversible ecological damage recorded in human history. More than ever, it has become crucial that rapid measures are to be taken to address the climate crisis. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change presses us even more urgently to reconsider our ecological footprint.

As the world is heading back to the rehabilitation stage of the pandemic, economic recovery fuels the same practices which sacrifice vital environmental demands. This time should make us question how we can visualise and propose alternatives for a better future.

Can visual culture help us to generate radically different ways to think about climate action? We are interested in your propositions on how climate action and visual culture can inform one another and how this interrelationship is represented, documented, and researched.

This call for proposals of creative practice-based research and writing (academic and creative) in the form of position pieces, may seek to offer alternative forms of social structures through visual cultural practice, critically problematising structural inequalities by challenging existing representations. At a moment where there is a global uprising of social movements in the context of Covid-19, there is a need for a radical reconfiguration of society through the mobilisation of creative activity and research.

Climate action also encompasses changes in our immediate surroundings, with the destabilisation of identities and senses of belonging, power balance relations and other systemic structural inequalities. To this end, how can climate action in and through research and visual culture, render visible the underlying structural inequalities of the environments we inhabit?

Call to action:

The University of Huddersfield are interested in seeing collaborative responses to climate action created in visual culture from all over the world. This call to action invites you to consider how practices within visual culture can address and inform the climate emergency. At the same time, they encourage proposals that may recognise how climate crisis has become a driver for your research and/or practice. They accept proposals from all kinds of disciplines and mediums, including and not limited to creative practitioners, Postgraduate researchers, critical writers, academics, activist groups, manifestos etc.

Outcomes:

The selected proposals from across the world will be exhibited on a digitally curated platform. They aim to create a platform for networking and collaboration across local and international channels. To celebrate the launch of the exhibition, they will also host an online event where participants will be invited to share with them their processes and experience of being involved in this project. Critical feedback will be provided by guest speakers.

Guidelines to submitting:

Expression of interest:

We encourage you to submit up to 5 images of your proposed work and/or a written abstract of 300 words as your position piece (poetry, manifestos, academic research etc.)

More details at the link below.

Deadline for applications: 10th December

For more information visit https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/ceada/ourprojects/climate-action/