The Climate, Art, and Digital Activisms Festival of Ideas (Melbourne/Narrm 21-23 November, 2022) Program

 We live in precarious times: politically and culturally, and we propose that by connecting communities of educational researchers to each other, while offering a space and time to trouble and speculate as a community post COP27 and prior to meeting at ARRE will connect researchers to the larger climate and digital activism discussions happening globally. In the face of an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, education can make the difference as to whether people embrace the challenges they are confronted with or whether they are defeated by them we ask: 

1. What research might we need for this rapidly changing world?

2. What research do we need to contribute to a new ecosystem of learning?

3. What research do we need to do to transform education for our climate futures?’

The Climate, Art, and Digital Activisms 4-day Festival will bring together 75-100 interdisciplinary researchers, educators, and practitioners with expertise in the climate-related social issues, media, refugee communities, creative arts, curatorial practice, arts-based research, small data, and digital methods in an impactful program to be held at UNITWIN partner and UNESCO Observatory of the Arts, StudioFive, Melbourne. This site is important in this moment in time; it is a site connected to UNESCO through its research as a UNITWIN partner positioned within the Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. The festival connects a Dyason Fellowship, Postdoctoral Fellowship, SSHRC funded ‘Learning with the Land’ project AARE SIG Funding with broader collaborations between U21 Planetary Health ECR network and University of Melbourne Climate Hub.  

  

Led by the questions that underpinned the 4-day festival in Melbourne: 

1. What research might we need for this rapidly changing world?

2. What research do we need to contribute to a new ecosystem of learning?

3. What research do we need to do to transform education for our climate futures?

We hosted a 1-day pre-AARE conference event in Adelaide on the opening weekend of AARE 2022. To do urgent activist boundary crossing work that is not discipline dependent we must collaboratively develop ways of working as educational researchers, that move beyond colonial disciplinary understandings. 

The day began with a Keynote by Dyason Fellows: Dr Annamaria Neag from Charles University (Prague) and Dr Sarah Healy followed by a day-long interdisciplinary workshop working with an artists-in-residence to explore the question: What research do we need to do to transform education?