Activists, artists and scholars attended the Czech Academy of Science and Charles University in Prague from September 23-24, 2019, to organize collaboratively around being-in-common in times of climate crisis, focusing especially on Canadian and Central European perspectives on energy transition and climate justice.
Participants were asked to consider:
- What are alternatives to technological fixes that resist a nature/culture or ecology/technology divide and locate the capacity to act once again solely with the (hu)man?
- What conceptual/methodological tools and modes of mobilization are working and why?
- How can we open up to the “unimaginable” and embrace uncertainty and indeterminacy?
- What unexpected solidarities and critical infrastructures come into view between our projects when permaculture, solar energy or anti-coal activisms engender concerns with climate justice, gender inequalities, racism, and vice versa?
- And, finally, when scientific research and modelling are not catalyzing change, how might we mobilize languages, imagery, performance, to provoke and inspire – to make our analyses more widely available without losing nuance?
Keynote speaker Sheena Wilson, also led creative writing exercises and share experiences with research creation, speculative storytelling and public engagement in Canada.
Workshop Outputs
Forthcoming in 2022: Socialni Studia special issue Climate Action: Infrastructures, Eco-Imaginaries, and Transversal Solidarity.
The workshop was jointly organised by Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Arnošt Novák (Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague), Marta Kolařová (Czech Academy of Sciences) and Sheena Wilson, and was supported by the project ‘Techno-ecology of Solar Energy” (Czech Science Foundation, no. 17-14893S).