Berwick-Barcelona: a case study in creative collaborative approaches to climate change research

ABSTRACT

The longstanding relationship between art and geography continues to develop through a “creative re/turn” as more geographers apply creative methodologies within their research, and more artists situate their work within geography discourse. This paper presents a case study of a participatory art working session held in collaboration with Newcastle University Institute for Sustainability that models potential applications of the creative re/turn within Higher Education. Taking climate change as an invitation to innovate and reimagine, the working session brought together researchers, educators and administrators from across the university’s natural and social sciences to use an artistic toolkit to design the fictional new town BWK-BCN (read: Berwick-Barcelona), a town merging Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish borders with Barcelona as a radical adaptation to climate change. The case study identifies key benefits and practical challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to climate change teaching and research. Despite some challenges, this paper suggests that collaborations with participatory art practices can provide the critical reflective and imaginative space to support creative research, learning, and engagement processes essential for tackling the unprecedented complexity that climate change presents.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory art
• climate change
• creative re/turn
• boundary spanner

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I make a distinction between workshops and working sessions. While workshops are popular within Participatory Art and Participatory Design practices, they generally have specific objectives and engage individuals who are already deemed stakeholders, during a specific timeframe. Working sessions, on the other hand, aim to serve as catalysts with the intention that anyone can participate, and that some elements of the experience within the session carry over into participants’ everyday lives. A framework is applied to a working session, but participants are free to reshape it. While working sessions are individual events, they form part of the overall ecosystem of the work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Northern Bridge DTP/AHRC Studentship (Grant number 1506696) and Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal.