Tyszczuk, Renata and Smith, Joe
(2009).
The Interdependence Day Project: Mediating Environmental Change.
The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 3(6)
pp. 37–62.
(
Click here to request a copy from the OU Author.)
Abstract
This paper will reflect on the underlying motivations and tensions sitting
behind a project generated by a partnership between the Open University’s
Geography Department, Sheffield University’s Architecture Department and the
new economics foundation (nef), that seeks to provoke and test re-framings of
environmental change in the public sphere.
The Interdependence Day project (ID)
is a research, communications and participation project centred on taking a fresh tone and approach to issues around environment, development and globalization. ID is politically explicit, but frank about
its experimental and uncertain status as a project. It has revolved around
a distinctive mix of public events, publications, art practice and academic/policy seminars. These
activities have started to probe the potency of the concept of
interdependence for public understanding of and responses to environmental change at a moment when the density of relations between the ecological, the social and the political are so evident. The work has arisen out of an extended programme of
action research on media and environmental change by one of the project
partners Joe Smith, and in architectural design teaching, research and art
practice by Renata Tyszczuk. The paper will reflect upon the usually implicit
ethical and political commitments that researchers and participants are delivered into by
dint of their ‘knowing about climate change’. It will say some provocative
things about the distinctive responsibilities that the issue carries for
research, art practice, interdisciplinarity and the politics of knowledge
mediation.
Actions (login may be required)
