Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff, Arts, Sciences and Climate Change: Practices and Politics at the Threshold. Science as Culture, 21 (1), 2012.
ABSTRACT
Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called for
expanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for
mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences
discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and
researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide
a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses
to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the arts–science
intersection offer for rethinking climate change? Which historic
conjunctions of arts–sciences are most useful to consider in relation to
present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments
significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty,
contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate
change may generate emergent forms of practice that require new
approaches—not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new
thresholds, or ‘meetings and mutations’ that these practices cross.
Thresholds—narrated here through the figure of ‘zero degrees’—offer a
way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations,
uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political
practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and
relations lead not to fundamental re-definitions or demarcations of arts
and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics.
Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques
Rancière and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in which political
possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and
practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable
‘collective experimentation’ within both creative practices and climate
sciences.
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