Environmentally Engaged Arts, Calls to Action, and Canadian Case Studies in Ecologies in Practice
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 07/10/2024
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 392
In the second episode of this four-part series, Elysia French, Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University, and Amanda White, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Art at Western University, discuss the guiding principle of “environmentally engaged arts” in their coedited title Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada. Drawing on contemporary scholarship that analyzes the intersection of environmental art and social justice, they utilize this terminology to encourage nonrestrictive definitions of art that extend beyond visual artmaking. Next, they explain the intention behind the action-oriented chapter sections—Interrupt, Witness, (Re)Place, Reflect—and its narrative thread that highlights the contributors’ activism and methodology. Last, our guests consider the title’s geographical focus on Canada, parsing through the enormity of the environmental studies discipline, environmental justice issues specific to Canada, and the global scale of local case studies.
About the guests:
Elysia French
Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts
Brock University
Elysia French is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University. French is trained as an art historian and studies contemporary art and the environment, with an interest in the visual culture of oil, climate change, and multispecies relationships.
Amanda White
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating, Department of Visual Art
Western University
Amanda White (she/her) is a white settler artist/scholar currently living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Art at Western University. Her current work and research is focused on plants, food, and environmental justice. Learn more on Amanda’s website.
Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:
- Exploring Ecologies in Practice and Environmental Humanities
- Themes of Interruption, Interpretation, and Gathering in Ecologies in Practice
- How Art Changes Culture and the (Interdisciplinary) Future of the Environmental Humanities
Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Outlining the “Big, Big Tent” of Comics Studies
– The Contemporary Leonard Cohen
– Creative Disruption in Scholarship
– Performing Female Blackness
– Canadian Poetry Today
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