CUHRE Research Workshop: Art in and with Nature and Ecologizing Language
By Shelley Hannigan, Senior Lecturer in Art Education, Deakin University, Melbourne and Estella Kuchta, Langara College in Vancouver.
August 23, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Location: OD O99 Conferenceroom (ø6-202a-1)
This workshop will start with examples and ideas of different ways in which Australian artists create in and with nature. Participants will then be invited to spend time outside engaging in a related arts-based activity. After this activity, workshop participants will be invited to write a short description of their art using creative and relational language. English is the most widely used language in the world, and yet it contains several unecological features. Embedded within ordinary English sentences is the evidence of an individualistic ontology, materialism, and anthropocentrism. Participants will be invited to play with language use and explore more relational and ecological forms of expression.
Dr Shelley Hannigan works full time as a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, Australia. She is a visual artist and art educator, teaching and supervising Masters and PhD students across art practice and arts education. Situated in a School of Education she has developed many collaborative research projects over her 18 years in this role, with colleagues from STEM, environmental science and the arts. Some of this work is situated in the Centre for Regenerating Futures (CRF) of which she is a co-leader for the strand: Arts, Activism and the Anthropocene. A key research project she is involved in is Artefacts of the Future where school students explore uncertain futures in the face of Climate Change, through art. She has published extensively in academic journals, books and conferences: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=x7RE7JsAAAAJ As her art is also research, these are also recognized as Non Traditional Research Outputs: https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/shelley-hannigan.
Estella Carolye Kuchta teaches literature, composition, and research writing at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada. She is the coauthor with Sean Blenkinsop of Ecologizing Education: Nature-Centered Teaching for Cultural Change (Cornell, 2024). Her ecocritical research into Canadian love stories resulted in the novel Finding the Daydreamer (Elm Books, 2020). She has worked as a research assistant to Dr. Gabor Maté (MD), an editor for Susila Dharma International, and an intern for the CBC Radio, and is a long-time member of the International Love Research Network. Her doctoral research investigates the epistemological potential of love and includes research on transrational knowledges and fieldwork in intuitive interspecies communication. For two years, she lived off-grid on a mountaintop in California amidst madrones, cacti, bluejays, scorpions, and lizards, while raising her infant son.
For participation, please send an email to CUHRE Center Coordinator Dikte Reeh Andersen: Diktand@sam.sdu.dk