Practical and conceptual challenges with conservation in the 21st Century – call for provocations!

Practical and conceptual challenges with conservation – call for provocations!

Daisy Sutcliffe, who coordinated the Arts Programme for the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, and her colleague Phil Nicholson are keen to invite provocations from those working in conservation for their upcoming session Visualising the Conserved Anthropocene at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers conference later this year.

How does the way that ‘Nature’ is considered ‘other’ or opposed to ‘Humans’ affect your work?

How does the current state of geopolitics impact on the way that conservation is practiced in your field?

How could visualisations that address these assumptions help to conserve our environments in the anthropocene, and help to support your work?

You don’t need to be academic or speak in academic language, in fact we hope that the session will question this format and be able to make further links between those who primarily think about conservation and those who practice conservation daily. For those who are not planning to attend the conference or might find a trip to London prohibitive, we can offer a live video link, and there is the possibility that we may be able to negotiate limited guest passes for the conference on the day of the session.  If you are interested, please follow the instructions below, and, with apologies, please note the short deadline of next Monday, 6th February.

Call for Provocations: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2017: ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. London, 29th August – 1st September 2017

Visualising the Conserved Anthropocene 

Convenors: Daisy Sutcliffe (The University of Glasgow), Philip Nicholson (The University of Glasgow)

Sponsored by: Postgraduate Forum (PGF)

‘Conserving’ our environments in the Anthropocene throws up new conceptual and practical challenges, not least that the organisations that are charged with supporting this conservation such as UNESCO, the IUCN and WWF were set up by Western cultures in the mid-twentieth century. Here, the environment was largely framed within a classical geopolitical, modernist thinking with humans at the pinnacle of a hierarchical structure with responsibility for an appropriate stewardship of a Nature conceived of as other. As numerous commentators have observed, the Anthropocene has challenged the ‘rootedness’ of philosophical debates on a life well lived, instead placing emphases on material ontologies of exposure and vulnerability, symbiosis and depredation. Furthermore, it has exhausted established modes of visualising Nature, from photos of doomed polar bears, maps showing the borders of inscribed sites of conservation, to the transects that reveal a geological archive. What are the implications of such material ontologies for ‘visualising’ the Anthropocene? How might new modes of visualisation be developed for the Anthropocene and how might these be applied to conservation policy and practice? This session will explore these fraught, yet productive, tensions between the Anthropocene, conservation and visualisation, with an emphasis on work in progress.

We invite provocations reflecting on some of the challenges of conservation and visualisation of environments in the Anthropocene. We ask, how might these new modes of visualisation be productive for the conservation of environments in the Anthropocene?

Such provocations might include, but are not limited to:

•       Insights from artist residencies
•       Curating the Anthropocene
•       New approaches in geographic information science
•       Creative Geo-visualisations
•       Field encounters across disciplinary and cultural boundaries
•       New or novel institutional structures
•       Experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to conservation

Contributors will have up to 10 minutes to outline their provocations. We welcome presentations in the form of traditional papers but also encourage alternative formats such as PechaKucha style, photo or video essays, short film screenings, performances etc. These will lead to a facilitated discussion.

Please submit title, name & affiliation and an abstract of no more than 250 words to p.nicholson.1@research.gla.ac.uk and Daisy Sutcliffe daisyksutcliffe@gmail.com) by Monday 6th February 2017.

Daisy Sutcliffe

Researcher, Evaluator, Facilitator and Producer, engagement with nature / heritage / arts
+44 7811 379105
@rusticglitz