Date: 30 May - 2 June 2024

Location: University of Warwick

This summer symposium intends to gather and connect Environmental Humanities scholars in Warwick with our visiting partners from the 2023 EUTOPIA Connected Community on EH (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, NOVA University Lisbon, Dresden University of Technology). The symposium takes place in the context of Warwick’s new MA in Environmental Humanities (MAEH) and the new University Spotlight on Sustainability. Confluence aims to share interdisciplinary best practices, and explore and confront critical issues in our field. In so doing it will showcase our Faculty's own EH research and teaching with colleagues across the Connected Community.

An initial background for the symposium will be a comparative discussion of environmental challenges faced in our respective locales, as cities across Europe confront different but related manifestations of the climate crisis – if, for example, Venice embodies a paradigmatic ‘stage of the Anthropocene’ as it faces the challenge of rising sea levels, then Coventry offers an exemplary site for ‘mapping transition’ from an economy historically enmeshed in fossil fuel industries. How do our institutions, and we as educators and researchers in the environmental humanities, not only frame but actively map a way through some of the key socio-cultural, economic and political challenges we face in the transition to a decarbonised future? The symposium (31st May, 10am-1pm) will feature a keynote from Dr. Michael Niblett on Coventry in the world-ecology, short comments from selected respondents (Myka Tucker-Abramson (Warwick), Shaul Bassi (Ca'Foscari, Venice) and Graeme Macdonald (Warwick) leading into discussion, to be followed by a roundtable with colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts and the Connected Community: Tom Simpson (Warwick) Moritz Ingwersen (TU Dresden), Fabienne Viala (Warwick), Nina Vieira (Nova, Lisbon), Tiago de Luca (Warwick), Lucio De Capitani (Ca'Foscari, Venice), moderated by Nick Lawrence (Warwick). This will address pressing questions faced by environmentally informed humanistic study. What new methodological challenges and opportunities arise?

A lunch to follow the symposium will afford opportunity for further networking and break-out discussion. Additional activities with our visiting partners from the Connected Community address Coventry’s focus on connectivity and transport, with local case studies in the nearby High Speed Rail (HS2) development and Warwick’s National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC). The opening reception (30th May, 6-7pm, with drinks) will involve a discussion and display of the Art Work 'Memories of a Future City' by the artist Paul Lemmon, commissioned by the Warwick Transformations Artist-Researcher Collaboration fund and displayed as part of the 23/24 Coventry Biennial, which had a strong environmental theme this year.

A further benefit of the symposium, through field activities and site visits to be held over the weekend, will be to strengthen Warwick’s connections with local community organisations, engaging green groups and regional partners (including the Coventry Biennial, the Sherbourne River Project and Coventry for a Green New Deal). At the same time, we aim to connect ‘local’ with ‘international’ impact – comparing, for example, Brandon Marsh (managed by the Warwick Wildlife Trust) with similar nature reserves elsewhere, or local food sustainability initiatives with their counterparts in Venice, Lisbon and Dresden. By means of these connections, we aim to model the kind of environmental literacy and action informed by a world-systems perspective that is at the heart of Warwick’s environmental humanities research and pedagogy, and thereby to grasp regional concerns as always more than ‘merely’ local – as, rather, a confluence of concerns across the scales from globe to region to neighbourhood and campus.

Details of the programme can be found here:

To REGISTER TO ATTEND the Opening Reception (Thursday 30th) and/or the Main Symposium (Friday 31st) please click here