Films

Interested participants are invited to submit proposals for presentations to M.S.Poltorak@kent.ac.uk

There is a recognised disconnect between publicly available scientific information on climate change and publics’ capacity and interest to take them seriously in relation to their own knowledge. For people to act on climate change knowledge, there needs to be more conversation across politically sensitive knowledge realms.

This workshop will be concerned with the use of visual anthropological methodologies and theory in interventions to increase public and governmental action in addressing climate change.

One of visual anthropology’s key activities relates to how media are received, understood and acted upon in diverse cultural and societal contexts. Another is media creation based on participation, imagination and reference to the cultural and historical value of the different senses.

This panel will focus on how these activities may be use to support multiple scale climate change actions in one or more of the following forms:

1. Teaching visual anthropology in relation to climate change
2. Drawing on the established canon of ethnographic films to demonstrate climate change and its impacts
3. Creating new films and other resources that increase consciousness of climate change impacts and actions, drawing on the anthropology and environmental anthropology of climate change
4. Developing case studies that link the global causes of climate change to local impacts
5. Documentation and distribution of climate changes interventions unacknowledged by mainstream media.
6. Identification of the consumerist assumptions underlying passive acceptance of future climate change scenarios.
7. Affirming actions that address climate change awareness unencumbered by academic validation.
8. Contributing to collectively imagined futures in which engaging with climate change engages with historical social inequalities.
9. Supporting organisations that contribute to climate change awareness
10. Supporting the development of ecovillages and other communities with strong ecological orientations.

The final form of the workshop will depend on the nature of the submissions. But one aim will be to brainstorm an agenda for further action and research, and to create a network of interested parties.