Workshop Two: “Exchanging knowledge: experiments in research communication and film”
Workshop at Oxford University + Public Screening at Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford
Saturday 30 September - Monday 2 October 2023
The Ultimate Picture Palace
More-than-human perspectives on the planet is a collaboration between the Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences network of Oxford University and the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK)’s Experimental Film and Media Art seminar. It is supported by funding from the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.
Open events:
Film screening and panel discussion
Saturday 30th September 2023, 6pm at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Jeune St, Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1BN
For further details, please visit the event page.
Working lunch
Monday 2 October 2023, 12.30-2pm, Oxford Martin School
For all Oxford researchers interested in the role of film and film-making in climate and environmental conversations.
Nina Fischer and Lilli Kuschel will show short excerpts from their films, and lead a discussion on how environmental humanities researchers might work with filmmakers to explore central questions form new angles.
For further details and to register please visit the event page.
The ‘Exchanging Knowledge’ workshop builds on online conversations from 2020 and our first ‘Animal Eyes on the Planet’ meeting in Berlin in June 2022. Here, researchers and artists from UdK Berlin and Oxford University came together to give and discuss papers that described our work and our ideas, and watched the artists’ films together, so that we were able to understand each other’s practices, methodologies and imaginative tools. Our conversations at the time, and since, have encouraged us to think about new ways to bring together our diverse disciplinary expertise in order to communicate complex, nuanced ideas to wider audiences. Among many humanities, social and natural science researchers, there is an assumption that film and animation can be used straightforwardly to communicate academic research. What has emerged from our conversations and film-viewing is the recognition that artists and filmmakers bring a richness of perception and imagination to the material that is quite different from and far more powerful than what purely academic researchers usually envisage. This seems an extremely important, largely untapped, way to bring thought-provoking ideas to wider audiences who might have switched off from more conventional visual and media presentations about the urgent issues of today.
We therefore intend in our ongoing collaboration to find ways to bring together our quite distinct approaches to create more effective ways of thinking, seeking to understand, expressing, and offering new audiences the opportunity to reflect on, more-than-human perspectives. We are motivated by both our ongoing research interests and a deep concern about the deteriorating situation in the wider world, in these Anthropocene times.
This second workshop, “Exchanging knowledge: experiments in research communication and film”, brings together the original participants from the UdK and Oxford, with some additional participants from the University of Oxford, including the Environmental Humanities Programme and the Botanic Gardens.
Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences; Environmental Humanities
