Introducing: Critical Cat Studies by Nazli Akhtari
Critical Cat Studies offers guidance on how to learn with cats in ways that blur Euro-American centric ways of knowing and help us attune to more joyful, sustainable, and equitable ways of living and making worlds.
Who better than unruly cats can complicate for us the artificial borders we constantly construct?
Throughout history witches, women, lesbians, queers, Marxists, and modernity’s outcasts have made kin with cats. What if we consider the lineage of feline kinship as a praxis of disorderly living against the violence of capitalism that thrives on racism, sexism, queer and transphobia and environmental destruction?
The Jameel Arts & Health Lab, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, is working on a policy brief to explore how the arts can help mitigate, communicate and adapt to the health effects of climate change.
This open call is an invitation for artists, practitioners, healthcare, and cultural workers to contribute by sharing relevant resources and examples of artistic projects to be included in this research.
The research team welcomes examples of artistic projects, reports, case studies, dissertations, news articles, blogs, government documents, digital materials, and any other resource that you feel would be relevant.
Please use this form to describe and upload related materials.
The submission deadline is July 31.
We’re helping to get the word out. If you have relevant materials, or know someone who could contribute, please share!
As we mark the two-year milestone since the launch of the Creative Green Tools Canada program, we are happy to share that nearly 900 users have embraced the Tools platform across Canada. These diverse entities, spanning organizations of all sizes, as well as individual artists, have embarked on a crucial journey towards quantifying their emissions and taking climate action.
The CG Tools have been widely adopted by organizations across provinces and territories within Canada.
It is amazing to observe the diverse array of individuals and organizations within the arts and culture sector using the Tools. Among the Footprints documented thus far we have:
Thanks to the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, this year we’re diving into research aimed at enhancing user experience and inclusivity, including:
Tailored tools for the publishing industry.
Expanded functionality for rural and remote users.
Enhanced transportation options for traveling artists & cultural workers.
Integration of Indigenous knowledge through language.
By adding your data, you contribute to the cultural community’s collective action on climate change.
Introducing: At Least This Will Make a Funny Show by Kristina Wong
At Least This Will Make a Funny Show guides you through attempting to make dramatic social change in the world without giving into existing systems of charity, failing, and then making an original (maybe award winning) solo performance piece about how you tried.
This course is not to diminish the seriousness of the problems that overwhelm our world, but recognizes that the ability to persevere in this fight will require creativity and a lot of coping strategies, which include humor.
Includes a bonus module on how to deal with being cancelled, trolled, or blacklisted because your best attempt at making social change will always piss off someone.
Introducing: Unsustainable Utopias by Meghan Moe Beitiks
Unsustainable Utopias is an exploration of the false promise of utopias and the human tendency to seek them out, build them up, and destroy them.
We will review failed utopias across time and cultures and examine the events that led to their various transitions into cults, militias, closed communities, tragedies or just discontinued projects.
This course is an exercise in learning from humanity’s most ambitious (and terrifying) mistakes– while remembering that we ourselves are human.
The course is a discussion of alternatives to utopias, based on research in community development and organizing, as well as the structures of inequity that inevitably inform even the most ambitious projects.
Together we will make a broken utopia based on the world’s worst mistakes and consider antidotes for the worst social poisons.
Introducing Crip Glam: Spells for Everyday Disability Activism by Julia Havard
Crip Glam highlights the aesthetic interventions that queer and trans disabled people use to undo ableism, cissexism and heterosexism, and casts spells for crip femme futures, a distinctly femme and disabled approach to aesthetics and activism.
Beyond survival, what are the practices and tools that are used by those who are multiply-marginalized to craft pleasure, to elicit joy, to invoke humor, and to gross people out?
This course supports learning about radical practices of disability arts and culture and practices of disability activism to underscore how the liberation of multiply-marginalized disabled people is integral to collective liberation.
Peasant futurisms is a call to transform capitalist cities into edible and wilder ecocities, with protected greenbelts and foodbelts, rooted in circular economies with the goal of growing more liveable and delicious futures for all.
This course invites learning from peasant knowledges and practices of cooperative labour, mutual aid, subsistence farming, and self-sustainability to posit peasant futurisms as a joyful way of living locally and relationally that rejects forced ruptures from land and resist the compulsory digitization of life.
It is an assemblage of a multitude; of social connections, of environments, of feelings, not limited to property and privacy. In fact, most homes, also more than human ones, are ecosystems themselves. The diversity of their nature becomes more and more apparent as we try to extend our understanding of what can and what could constitute a home. This issue features several artistic practices alongside an essay and poetry that engage with gameplay in different ways. These artists and thinkers consider the act of play, and playfulness as a way of inhabiting and creating environments, communities, and ecosystems (which is to say different homes). This collection of approaches towards game practices constitutes a reflection on our deeply entangled position in all these complex social ecosystems.
EARTHDAY.ORG’s Your Art, Our Earth poster competition for Earth Day 2024 is underway and open to student submissions until January 22, 2024!
On April 22nd, 1970, the very first Earth Day saw 20 million people take to the streets to advocate for environmental protection. Since then, EARTHDAY.ORG has stood as a champion for the planet. Each year, a billion people worldwide engage in various Earth Day activities, including participating in cleanups, signing petitions, and supporting our initiatives. Throughout the history of Earth Day, we’ve harnessed the power of impactful art to emphasize the urgent need to care for our planet and advocate for the environment.
In 2024, our theme is Planet vs. Plastics, aiming to spotlight the detrimental effects of plastics on our environment, both in our oceans and on land. Additionally, microplastics are posing a threat to our health. They have even invaded the fashion industry and the clothes we wear — which is why we launched our Fashion for the Earth campaign.
EARTHDAY.ORG is calling for a 60% reduction in global plastic production by 2040. We invite YOU to contribute by creating an iconic poster vividly illustrating the urgent need to say NO to plastics!
As a theatre scholar and practitioner attending the COP28climate summit, I was invited to experience a performance of the play Bright Light Burning. Playwright Steven Gaultneyauthored this play, and it was produced by the Cairo-based, internationally recognized The Theatre of Others. Adam Marple, co-artistic director of this theatre, invited me to the performance.
The performance Bright Light Burning, in dialogue with my own research and theatre practice, led me to reflect on the role of art in climate change issues.
Signs saying ‘polluters’ and ‘climate finance – direct funds to Indigenous People’ seen at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 10, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
The project takes its name from a Maya Angelou poem. The poetry anthology was a collaboration between scientists, health experts, educators, translators, artists and youth leaders in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. The project aims “to unite us to forge a greener healthier, and fairer world.”
Bright Light Burning, inspired by this larger poetry endeavour, is a theatrical journey that merges artistry, storytelling and environmental activism. The play presents choices made by individuals in responses to climate change — from denial to activism.
It addresses policymakers on the importance of storytelling in forging new directions. The ensemble comprises actors from different parts of the world — from Singapore to Australia, Egypt to the United States, United Arab Emirates to the United Kingdom.
‘Bright Light Burning’ Dec. 7 performance at COP28.
As different stakeholders continue to enact signed deals, pledges and commitments after COP28, and as communities grapple with the need for political will to implement needed change, who is present or absent at the table is important to achieving an equitable future.
Here are four ideas that could guide interactions, negotiations, thinking and actions around climate justice.
1. Think globally, act locally and personally
Central to the perspectives offered in these performances is the need to decentre a universalist approach to resolving climate issues. We Are The Possible reminds us to start where we are — not out of fear, but hope that humans have the capacity to bring about change. We have to believe in that.
We need to re-engage place-based and localized solutions, because what works in Latin America may not work in North America.
In my own context in Saskatchewan, theatre artists in have relied on “strategic foresight” to imagine how the theatre we want in the Prairies could help people navigate climate instability while transforming racial injustice. Through such approaches, the capacity of different regions can be built.
2. Embrace alternative ways of knowing
The performances I have seen at COP28 and other theatre projects such as climate change theatre action remind us of the need to return to a relational approach with nature in our existence, and advocate for green theatre.
When we develop habits of seeing ourselves as future ancestors, this means we have to save for the future generation and this means consuming less. This way of seeing and knowing ourselves in relationship to our world in turn affects how we use resources. The performances of Bright Light Burning were designed with a minimalist approach — no prop, set, light or make-up etc. This approach to “greening theatre” has been reiterated by arts practitioners.
Retooling Green Tools for Theatre in Africa: People Planet and Performance roundtable discussion from July 2023.
Socially engaged theatre is about holding urgent social questions at the centre of our theatre practice. In so doing, as we engage with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, questions emerge: What alternative knowledge systems critical to ecological and cultural processes are yet to be known? How can alternative knowledge that has been pushed to the periphery help us think and walk through the polycrisis? In what ways can knowledge from the global majority be amplified?
For instance, prioritizing the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples will require genuine inclusion since it is believed that Indigenous Peoples are stewards of 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Their intergenerational leadership, practices and knowledge in sustainable climate justice need to be recognized for biodiversity to be recovered.
Activists participate in a demonstration for climate solutions at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
3. Embrace the need for a holistic system approach while fostering equal partnerships that seek to account for inequities, such as class-based and racialized inequities. Holistic system approaches mean that participation in climate change mitigation, anticipatory adaptation and climate justice initiatives should involve equal and genuine partnership and collaboration across geographies. Having a “co-design” mindset is essential to building sustainable systems and solutions.
4. Finally, artists and creative initiatives continue to challenge us to champion climate action.Creatives are invited to think about the impact of their production on health, recovery, peace finance, just transition, gender equality and Indigenous Peoples globally.
All hands must be on deck to walk the talk emerging from COP28, if these conversations are to yield the desired results.
(Top image: Islene Facanha, of Portugal, participates in a demonstration dressed with images of wildfires at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. [AP Photo/Peter Dejong])
