Who Gets to Speak about Climate Risk & Resilience?: Artistic Practice as Epistemic Intervention
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 9:30am
- 11:30am
(120 mins)
Presenters
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Abstract
The climate crisis necessitates engagement across diverse backgrounds, cultures, and disciplines, each shaped by distinct linguistic and experiential contexts. However, language is frequently homogenised in pursuit of improved collaboration, marginalising lived experience and cultural nuance, and reinforcing power structures. This workshop draws on interdisciplinary projects (BluePrint and DIRECTED), reflecting on challenges in climate risk communication to surface, recognise and integrate diverse knowledge across policy, science and communities. Jointly led by a climate adaptation scientist, design researcher and a facilitator with a background in anthropology and artistic practice, the workshop foregrounds different situated perspectives, revealing how knowledge is created, interpreted, and experienced. Artistic practice is treated as a diagnostic method rather than a tool for engagement or delivery. Ethnographic and arts-based approaches produce and hold situated, embodied knowledge and reveal why unstructured dialogue often fails in complex governance settings.
The workshop invites participants to engage with the challenges of socially engaged art–science collaboration through creative and playful exercises using case studies from shared practice, a performance poetry process and facilitated reflection. This co-production process makes conceptual framing of responsibility, uncertainty and possibility less abstract and reveals the disconnect between technical language and lived experience. Facilitated reflection considers how certain forms of knowledge gain recognition, shaping interpretations and responses. The workshop becomes a shared inquiry into how climate risk and resilience is understood and how alternative ways of knowing can reconfigure dialogue and emerging solutions. Impact is epistemic: it makes power in language visible and sayable, while recognising marginalised knowledge as legitimate in climate risk governance.
The workshop invites participants to engage with the challenges of socially engaged art–science collaboration through creative and playful exercises using case studies from shared practice, a performance poetry process and facilitated reflection. This co-production process makes conceptual framing of responsibility, uncertainty and possibility less abstract and reveals the disconnect between technical language and lived experience. Facilitated reflection considers how certain forms of knowledge gain recognition, shaping interpretations and responses. The workshop becomes a shared inquiry into how climate risk and resilience is understood and how alternative ways of knowing can reconfigure dialogue and emerging solutions. Impact is epistemic: it makes power in language visible and sayable, while recognising marginalised knowledge as legitimate in climate risk governance.
Biography
Dr Lydia Cumiskey is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the MaREI Centre, University College Cork working on enhancing disaster resilience in the EU Horizon funded DIRECTED project. Over the past 10 years Lydia has worked in research and consultancy projects in the areas of flood risk governance, risk communication and climate adaptation. Her recent work in the EU Horizon funded DIRECTED project focuses on capacity building for knowledge co-production in Real World Labs and embracing creativity for collaboration. She led the Creative Ireland funded project BluePrint which co-created artistic risk communication outputs supporting communities and policymakers together with artist Sara Walmsley.
