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Beyond "Doom and Gloom"

A Walking Colloquium

21.03.2014 09:30  – 17:00 

Location: Munich. The workshop will begin at the Ella Café at the Lenbachhaus Museum and conclude at the Rachel Carson Center. All participants are encouraged to wear clothing and shoes suitable for walking in whatever weather the day presents.

We are interested in engaging in deep conversation about what it means to shift beyond “doom and gloom,” and to create movement toward more hopeful, solutions-oriented environmental narratives. What is particularly intriguing about this theme is its capacity to welcome a diversity of interdisciplinary perspectives and its potential to support a paradigm shift in the ways in which environment issues are characterized and addressed.

To help us “hack” the boundaries of our thinking, we will draw on the historic inspiration of the Blue Rider artists who lived and worked in Schwabing where the RCC is based. We will situate ourselves in the spirit of “movement” by conducting the workshop as a “Walking Colloquium” in which we share ideas while physically exploring. We’ll begin the day at the Lenbauchhaus Museum, opening the discussion of the workshop theme at the Museum café and then briefly exploring the Blue Rider collection. We’ll walk and talk our way through the streets and parks of Schwabing where Blue Rider artists worked and lived. We’ll enjoy lunch and a participatory art experience to further stimulate our creative engagement with the workshop theme, at the home of Elin Kelsey. After lunch, we’ll walk the few short blocks to the RCC to discuss how we will express our ideas in an issue of RCC Perspectives. We will briefly explore potential interest in pursuing a RRC/LMU collaborative research program on this theme funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 program.

Provocative Questions to Guide Our Walking Colloquium:

  • How do we overcome the pervasive belief that if we speak of hope, we must not know how bad things are?
  • How do we address the fear that if we acknowledge the capacity for resilience, we risk feeding the rhetoric of environmental skeptics or the mistaken perception that we don’t have to change?
  • How might we “hack” our rational response to shifting environmental narratives in order to embrace more holistic, integral, emotive, perceptive, creative ways forward?
  • If our academic credibility and advancement is based on our capacity for critique, how can we risk shifting towards solutions-based orientations?
  • How do we bring the Digital Age, new stages and structures of collective consciousness, the capacity for agency in the other-than-human world, and other emerging trends into the ways in which we imagine and invent new environmental narratives?
  • How can we best influence and enact a shift beyond “doom and gloom”?

Participation

Participation is limited to those currently residing within Europe and the UK. Christof Mauch and Elin Kelsey will invite 6-8 individuals who respond to the workshop call, particularly striving to create cultural, disciplinary, and age diversity. We will draw upon our academic, professional, and personal identities to collectively share ideas and feelings about ways of shifting beyond “doom and gloom” toward more hopeful, solutions-oriented environmental narratives.

The workshop call includes the expectation that participants will write a 1,500-2,000 word chapter for the Perspective to be submitted to the workshop organizers by the end of April, 2014. We will also invite shorter submissions from former RCC alumni who reside beyond Europe who have expressed interest in the theme.

If you are interested in participating, please contact Elin Kelsey (elin.kelsey@rcc.lmu.de) by 10 March 2014.