Sussex Humanities Lab PhD Spring Symposium: Experimental, Interactive and Playful Research Methodologies

By El Priest and Hanna Randall

In April, the SHL hosted a PhD Spring Symposium on experimental, interactive and playful research methodologies, which was organised by El Priest and Hanna Randall. The day was full of workshops, papers, and art marking. We had art materials freely available on the table for attendees to use as and when they liked; aiming to engender a sense of freedom, playfulness and creativity.

The day started with El’s paper and workshop on queer archiving and zine making. The paper focused on alternative epistemology and knowledges produced through queer methods of history making. Participants were encouraged to consider their own experiences and relationships as a source for emotionally engaged history making, to the end of producing a more community-informed account of the past. The zine making workshop and free use of the art materials helped attendees relax and make connections with one another in a creative environment.

We enjoyed a paper from Anthony Trory who discussed his research project on designing interactive prototypes to use as the materials in school-based learning science experiments. Anthony’s research aims to improve understanding of how a designer can optimise a child’s progression from concrete to abstract using the theory of ‘concreteness fading’. Put more simply, he’s been developing a pirate-themed augmented reality iPad app that teaches primary school children how the internet works. We also enjoyed a paper from Ross McKendrick on psychogeography and the city as archive. Beginning with a research methodology rooted in an understanding of the city as an archive, and following Michael Sorkin’s conceptualisation of architecture as a ‘legible’ form, Ross thinks about how to conduct a ‘counter-archival’ practice in the city. By documenting uses of the city not prescribed by original planning ideals, the counter-archive can become a democratic tool which community stakeholders can utilise and contribute to as they see appropriate.  

After lunch, Rich Thornton and Effie Makepeace led us through a theatre/drama workshop that was designed to introduce participants to the idea of theatre as a participatory and creative research method through a series of non-threatening, practical and fun games, exercises and discussion. We engaged with tools adapted from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, such as Image Theatre, as way to demonstrate their potential through gentle practical discovery. We also paid attention to the queer and decolonial potential of prioritising knowledge which emerges from the body and how this might feed into other quantitative and qualitative methods. 

To end the day, artists Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao facilitated a workshop on making prints using DIY photo developers using plants like calendula, cow parsley, hawthorn, willow and dandelion. Each participant’s print was intended to be their unique device to imagine/reflect upon/reframe their own relationship to time. These prints, made on photographic paper, change how they look over time, depending on their exposure to light. In the SHL garden, we discussed plants like Calendula, Dandelion, Willow, Hawthorn and Cow Parsley which have their own unique relationships to time, their medicinal properties, folklore and other fun facts. For example, calendula derives from the word ‘calen’ meaning ‘first day of the month’ as it blooms in every month of the year, and the willow tree, which grows near the water, shape shifts according to tidal bodies of water, the moon and our bodies. The above-mentioned plants contain phenols, which gives them the ability to react with photo-paper when mixed with a few other things. After choosing some plants to work with, participants made their own photo-developer and used the plants to draw and make marks to create photo prints which doubles up as a time telling/travelling/defining/defying device.

The day allowed people from different disciplines, universities and creative practices to meet, discuss and have fun. We focused on centring the playful and creative in research practice in order to create an enjoyable and accessible environment for people to share their ideas. The event was hugely successful and lots of new friends, ideas and art pieces were made!

AI and Archives

By Sharon Webb

The Sussex Humanities Lab was delighted to welcome speakers and delegates online and in-person to the AI and Archives Symposium last month (April 2023). The event, a collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab and two AHRC-IRC funded research projects, Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities and Women in Focus, was an opportunity to share interest in, knowledge of, and concerns with AI systems in archives and archival praxis.

I began by introducing the Lab itself, partly to provide context to the space in which the AI and Archives Symposium was being held, but also because it provided a useful foundation for thinking about the presenters’ many research areas. The AI and Archives Symposium spoke to SHL’s creative, critical, and collaborative approach to research: our programme has a wide disciplinary reach, from community archives to AI, media theory to conservation technology, critical heritage to intersectional feminism, digital humanities to experimental music technology and critical making. A perfect setting for this collision of past, present and futures: AI and Archives! What follows is an edited version of my introduction.

“AI and Archives” covers a lot of ground, and requires conversation that is critically engaged, creative and exploratory, and informed by feminist, queer and anti-racist ethics and approaches. The conversations around AI and Archives are collaborative across and within disciplinary boundaries – much like how SHL brings those elements uniquely together under one programme.

The foundations of the symposium lie not in the current hype around AI but within dialogue to address or redress the historic and chronic under- and mis-representation of specific histories related to women, people of colour, LGBTQI+ communities, as well as the histories of individuals and communities who exist across multiple lines of identity politics and their intersections. Work in both projects, Women in Focus and Full Stack Feminism, considers how “archives”, as a place of knowledge, knowledge exchange, of power, disempowerment and empowerment, play a pivotal role in terms of acknowledging and celebrating the existence of alternative histories to those which form the traditional historic canon (mostly covering the domain of cis-white men, the victors and their conquests, trade and empire). Both projects, and indeed other projects related to SHL’s research cluster, Critical Digital Humanities and Archives, view archives as a place where identity lives, and where we can exemplify the contributions of those who have often been ignored, sidelined, and/or silenced, explicitly or otherwise.

A critical aspect of the Women in Focus project is revisiting records in East Anglian Film Archives (EAFA) and Irish Film Archives (IFA), editing metadata and thereby revealing and acknowledging the role of women amateur filmmakers. These records range from short “home movies” to longer travelogues, and include a rich mix of topics. Revisiting and editing these records is labour-intensive. While the collection is relatively small (in comparison to other archival collections elsewhere), the task of reviewing each record and its associated object remains complex and time-consuming. The original metadata also speaks to this resource scarcity, as some descriptions are limited in scope and missing crucial detail about contributors to the resource.

With this in mind, we thought about how computer vision might help generate descriptive metadata for moving-image archives. Of course, within digital humanities and computer science, there are many ongoing experiments exploring how AI might assist in identifying, describing, and/or tagging digital objects – the work of Lisa Jaillan, our first speaker, attests to this – but the current hype also demands some immediate responses. As AI tools multiply and grow mainstream, and potentials turn into realities, such work becomes timely, not least because of the problems of bias and discrimination which such systems can replicate and perpetuate.

AI, machine learning, computer vision, and other automated methods have an allure for several reasons. For example, while the digitisation of historical records has developed considerably, archival methods of cataloguing (metadata descriptions) remain largely the same (manual, human). Automated methods can provide resource and quick fixes for an industry or service which faces dwindling resources despite ever-increasing content.

The challenge we face is using AI for good – while anticipating, acknowledging and/or expecting elements which are/could be profoundly bad. A few years ago, Dr Ben Roberts, co-director of the lab, ran an AHRC Network grant called ‘Automation Anxiety‘. It explored contemporary attitudes toward automation, and framed them within the longer history of ‘automation anxieties’ related to mechanical devices. A notable example is, of course, the Luddites. Often misrepresented as mere technophobes, the Luddites quite rightly argued for more critical reflection on the economic and social consequences of technological change within textile manufacturing. Luddite perspectives were revived by Langdon Winner in the automation anxiety wave of the 1970s, and are attracting attention once more today.

There are many contexts in which we could discuss the topic of AI and Archives. Using AI to generate descriptive metadata, whether to describe text, moving image, audio, etc., can itself help with the problem of discoverability, which might in turn help to address the problem of biased training sets. AI being used to improve archives, archives being used to improve AI: perhaps we are amid a new archival turn!

However, the scale of implementing these systems is not trivial, and nor are the associated environmental costs, including the carbon impacts of training and running AIs, and of running the servers where archival data is stored. If AI removes the barrier of describing collections, does it also remove the barrier/process of appraising? We can/could possibly “save everything” but this preservation strategy would likely be at odds with climate change strategies – what additional pressure might digital archiving activities impose on our already delicate global ecosystem?

Like most people, I did ask ChatGPT to write something: ‘a 200 word abstract about AI and Archives’. Among its list of “benefits” it listed that “AI has the potential to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with archival work, such as cataloging and indexing”. And while this may of course be of benefit, we must question what the fallout of such an approach is. What does knowledge gain? What are the epistemological pitfalls of such an approach which removes the human? Is an archive a mere store for documents or do they serve a wider purpose? Conversations around AI and Archives, and digital material in general, do require us to think critically about the social and cultural role of archives, in our communities, in our societies.

And to whom is this task “tedious”? This depends on the context – for community archives who are archiving their histories, this work is not tedious, it is an essential activity in terms of knowledge production, community identity and historical acknowledgment. If knowledge is power, then what happens when our knowledge production processes are no longer mediated through us, but rather done for us? Machine talking to machine, rather than one human (the archivists) talking with a researcher.

Archiving in these contexts provides a close reading of the artifacts. The archival process itself is a meaningful exchange with history. This is not a “tedious task” but an important intergenerational passing of knowledge, of culture, of life experience. Wrapped in this context, we know ethics should be a driving force for any conversation or experiments with AI technologies. AI is maths after all – if we don’t calculate the parameters, who will!

A summary of the event and speakers will follow in the next few weeks, but perhaps the most enduring thought for me was that we do not experience these technologies equally. Nor do we experience heritage and archives in the same way – questioning representation and questioning our individual experiences and responses is imperative. How we “handle” heritage objects and their interpretation must be informed by collective, community driven activities and dialogue. Archives and heritage objects are not merely objects: they represent stories, experiences, life, death, hurt, violence, trauma, and joy. Critically, they represent human sentience, and whether AI will read these objects in this way is still yet to be seen.

What is Concept Analytics and who are we?

Concept Analytics Lab (CAL) gathers linguists, AI engineers, and historians and is aligned with Sussex Humanities Lab within the Critical Digital Humanities and Archives research cluster. The principle mission behind Concept Analytics is to understand human thinking by analysing conceptual layering in texts. We overcome the divides between humanities, AI, and data science by harnessing the power of computational linguistics without losing sight of close linguistic analysis.

Although CAL was formally set up in 2021, its existence is the culmination of research energies over the previous few years and our desire for a stable space to explore concept-related ideas with like-minded scholars. Establishing the Lab has provided us with a platform from which we showcase our research expertise to researchers and other external partners. CAL has grown and changed through 2022, during which time we have counted on a team of six researchers at a range of stages in their careers, from undergraduate to postdoctoral level. The team is led by Dr Justyna Robinson.

CAL has so far partnered with research groups within Sussex, e.g. SSRP, as well as ones further afield, e.g. Westminster Centre for Research on Ageing. We have worked closely with Archives such as Mass Observation Archive and Proceedings of the Old Bailey, as well as non-academic organisations.

What were the highlights of the past year?

Our activities in the past year centred around exploring the content of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) and their Archive of May 12 Diaries with the aim of identifying conceptual changes that happened during Covid-19. We have completed two main research projects. CAL was awarded funding through the UK-RI/HEIF/SSRP call Covid-19 to Net Zero, in collaboration with industry partner Africa New Energies, to identify the impact of Covid-19 on people’s perceptions and habits in the context of household recycling and energy usage. CAL was also commissioned by the PETRA project (Preventing Disease using Trade Agreements, funded by UKPRP/MRC) to discover key themes and perceptions the public holds towards post-Brexit UK trade agreements. Keep reading for summaries of the findings of these research projects, as well as our other achievements this year.

Household recycling with Africa New Energy (ANE)

Through this project we identified that respondents to the MOP Household Recycling 2021 directive were deeply committed to recycling, but that these feelings were coupled with doubt and cynicism in relation to the effectiveness of the current system. MOP writers pointed to a perceived lack of transparency and standardisation in recycling processes and systems. Lack of transparency and standardisation have also been identified as obstacles to recycling adherence and efficacy in more policy-based analytical surveys (Burgess et al., 2021; Zaharudin et al., 2022). Changes in recycling habits among the UK population were identified as resulting from external factors, such as Covid-19 and reduced services, as well as lack of knowledge about how and what can be recycled. This research has significantly impacted the way our grant partner ANE approach their operations in terms of gaining energy from organic waste content. The research results also led ANE to start work on gamifying the waste classification process. It aims to encourage recycling compliance by replacing the current sanction-based system with a more rewards-based system. This research shows that the CAL already has a track record of establishing commercial routes of impact for our research and we see extending the scope of this impact to be a critical next step in CAL’s research programme. Further details on the collaboration with ANE can be found in this blog post.

We are seeking further HEIF funding to expand on the work already done with the Household Recycling directive to maximise policy impact by processing the handwritten answers and also processing the 2022 12 May Diaries for insight into the impact of the current energy crisis on respondents’ behaviour and attitudes to energy. As part of this project we would hold an exhibition in which we would invite various stakeholders including policy makers to showcase our work.

MOP UK Trade Deals

We were commissioned by the PETRA project’s lead Prof. Paul Kingston from the University of Chester to perform a conceptual linguistic analysis of the MOP UK Trade Deals directive. We used our approach to identify hidden patterns and trends in the answers to the directive questions. The conceptual analysis allows us to combine quantitative with qualitative methods and identify otherwise unperceived patterns. The main themes that arose were related to the perceived quality of trade deals and concerns about animal and ethical standards. We also performed an analysis linked to people’s knowledge, belief and desires. The results of the analysis will inform policy makers in their decisions regarding trade deals. Additionally this piece of work has attracted some interest from public health bodies with whom we are preparing a potential grant for future research.

Papers and presentations

In 2022 Justyna Robinson and Julie Weeds both presented the work they did within the context of the Old Bailey archives and have had their paper on that work published in the Transactions of Philological Society. In this paper they describe a novel approach to analysing texts, in which computational tools turn traditional texts into a corpus of syntactically-related concepts. Justyna Robinson and Rhys Sandow also have authored a paper forthcoming in 2023, ‘Diaries of regulation: Mass Observing the first Covid-19 lockdown’. This research will be presented at Mass Observation’s 85th Anniversary Festival, Mass Observation Archive, The Keep, 23^rd April 2023.

Website

As part of the SSRP/HEIF funding we received earlier this year we have also developed a website, which can be found at conceptanalytics.org.uk, where we also post blogs with news pieces and short research insights.

Storytelling and play for climate futures

By Jo Lindsay Walton

One of the most interesting projects I’ve been part of this year is the climate futures roleplaying game Kampala Yénkya. With the support of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside Dilman Dila and Maurice Ssebisubi (Uganda), Polina Levontin and Jana Kleineberg (UK), Bright Nkrumah (Germany / South Africa), and assorted playtesters and reviewers, to create innovative educational materials around climate adaptation, localised for Uganda.

UNESCO highlight the importance of futures literacy to a just climate transition:

Democratizing the origins of people’s images of the future opens up new horizons in much the same way that establishing universal reading and writing changes human societies. This is an example of what can be called a ‘change in the conditions of change.’

In the Global North, games and science fiction have longstanding links with futures research, and more recently have developed a strong connection with climate futures specifically (something we’ll be exploring in a special issue of Vector in spring 2023). By contrast, African speculative cultures are underutilised and under-theorised in the context of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

The project’s key deliverable was a tabletop roleplaying game, Kampala Yénkya (the title roughly translates to ‘Kampala of Tomorrow’). The game involves mapmaking and collaborative storytelling, and seeks to empower players to imagine the future of Kampala in many different ways. It is available to download here, under a Creative Commons license.

This is the first edition (‘Oracle’ edition), designed to be played with fairly minimal materials: a copy of the rules, an ordinary deck of playing cards (or two), some tokens (e.g. matchsticks), and blank paper and pen for drawing a map.

Science fiction writer Dilman Dila provided the initial inspiration and wrote a substantial portion of the game materials, as well as a supplementary collection of short stories. The game design was informed by the Applied Hope: Utopias & Solarpunk games jam which I co-organised last year, supported by SHL. Kampala Yénkya evolved through several rounds of playtesting in four of Kampala’s secondary schools. Maurice Ssebisubi, an environmental scientist and an educator, coordinated the games that involved nearly two hundred students, ensuring that the game is responsive to local climate information needs while also being fun and inspiring to play.

The bulk of the funding was made available from the SSRP’s Fund #6 to support the work of a team of Ugandan and UK academics, educators, and artists, to develop and test innovative climate action education materials for use in Uganda. SHL provided support in-kind in the form of me, and also a little extra funding for translation. All the core team members also volunteered additional time on the project. Special thanks also to Peter Newell and Michael Jonik for their help early on.

Outputs

Kampala Yénkya: Oracle Edition is now available as an open beta. This version of the game can be played with easily sourced materials (matchsticks, playing cards, pen and paper). The oracle edition is published in English and Luganda. bit.ly/ImagineAlternatives

Kampala Yénkya: Deluxe Edition is currently is in its playtesting / graphic design phase (design by Jana Kleineberg). Game packs will be delivered to 20 further Ugandan schools in late 2022 / early 2023. Each game pack contains:

Game materials and instructions — custom designed cards and ‘story stones’ for playing Kampala Yénkya. With the help of narrative prompts, players imagine Kampala in 2060, while also getting quizzed on their climate knowledge.
Inspiration deck — extra storytelling and worldbuilding ideas written by Dilman Dila, with contributions by Polina Levontin.
Further information — for players who want a more in-depth exploration of themes raised within the game.

Ugandan SF writer Dilman Dila has written a collection of short stories (working title Kampala Yénkya: Stories) set in a future Uganda, which will be published by Ping Press in 2023, with an introduction by Wole Talabi. Dila’s five interlinked tales were developed in dialogue with climate experts across Uganda and the UK. The collection also includes Q&A to enrich its value in educational settings.

Activities

Next Steps

The project wrapped up officially at the end of July, but the momentum has continued. Maurice Ssebisubi is leading on the creation of a network of environmental clubs across schools in Uganda. This work has been supported through our project, with the climate quiz and game playtesting used as activities to pilot the clubs.

We are exploring a potential workshop around the game at African Futures 2023 (Cologne).

The project will also be the central case study in a chapter on climate risk education for Communicating Climate Risk: 3rd Edition (SHL, 2023), from the Sussex Humanities Lab and the Institute of Development Studies PASTRES project.

All game materials are made available under a permissive Creative Commons licence, to encourage sharing and adaptation. We have received expressions of interest in localising the game for other countries (South Africa, Nigeria), and will be exploring ways to support this work in the future.

Tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) is popular all over the world, including many countries in the Global South, for both entertainment and education. But as far as we’ve been able to discover, it doesn’t yet appear very prevalent in Africa. We would be interested in hearing from TTRPG players, designers, writers, or societies / groups from the continent.

Neurodivergent Art Jam

By Hanna Randall

During March, April and May, the SHL was host to a series of weekly art-making and creative writing workshops for PhD researchers who identify as neurodivergent (autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, anxiety, depression etc.), which was funded by the University’s Researcher-led Initiative Fund.

The Art Jam was primarily intended to be a way of creating access to a safe and validating creative space where neurodivergents are among other individuals with similar experiences, fostering a sense of community and support. Neurodivergent people are often forced to mask their true selves in public and in learning environments for fear of discrimination and oppression, which, of course, is both exhausting and detrimental to our mental health and wellbeing. But a dedicated community such as this can render masking unnecessary for its activity duration, and it’s super fun!

The SHL is such a great space for this sort of community-based workshop series thanks to Silverstone’s accessibility, the SHL’s lighting and sound set-up which can adapt to suit sensory sensitivity, the outside garden suited to solitary creating, and the general adaptability of the room’s layout. Before and throughout the sessions I made it known to participants that social interaction was not expected, and non-normative social interaction and any sort of embodied expression of neurodivergence, such as using fidget spinners and tactile comfort objects, stimming, or using headphones or earplugs, would be met with absolute acceptance and fellow understanding.

Embodied ways of thinking, such as art-making and creative writing, are often a neurodivergent individual’s mode of expression, thanks to our divergent minds and ability to make connections through non-linear thinking. A regular space with free access to art materials and creative prompts provides a perfect environment to engender embodied exploration and play. Thanks to the Researcher-led Initiative Fund, the workshops were furnished with a bunch of art and craft materials such as paints, pencils and drawing pens, clay, pastels, and sketchbooks. In the first few weeks, we responded to prompts and created drawings, short pieces of creative writing and collage poems. Some participants were keen to learn lino printing, so we got some more materials in and had several excellent sessions designing a print, cutting the lino and pulling some beautiful prints. In other sessions, we learnt embroidery and played with play-dough in a spaghetti maker. Watch this space for more Art Jam sessions in the coming academic year…

Embodiment Hackathon

One recent weeked, as April turned to May, a group of the curious gathered in the Sussex Humanities Lab was home for the Embodiment Hackathon, facilitated by SHL’s visiting artist-researcher Sissel Marie Tonn along with Dominique Savitri Bonarjee, Emilie Giles, Sam Bilbow, Fiona Miller, and Jonathan Reus.

“What am I doing?” Dominique Savitri Bonarjee reflects on the Embodiment Hackathon over on her site.

Greening the Digital Humanities

We had, I think, a very good workshop.

To coincide with COP26, the Greening the Digital Humanities workshop was held by the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society, the University of Southampton Digital Humanities, the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Humanities & Data Science Turing interest group. It was a chance for Digital Humanities groups across the UK and Northern Europe to come together to consider what DH communities should do to rise to the urgent challenges of a changing climate and a just climate transition.

It was a summit of unprecedented scope and determination, and probably long overdue. Before the day itself, we had a couple months’ worth of drumroll. So we were able to start by sharing insights from these various scattered dialogues and surveys. Video here and slides here.

Building on this early engagement, four-ish main action themes emerged during the workshop:

Compiling a toolkit for DH researchers to do what we do more sustainably — finding out what’s already out there and signposting it, finding out what isn’t and inventing it.
Improving our knowledge, especially about how to measure our own impacts. This could definitely inform that toolkit, but it came up so much it deserves its own theme.
Nurturing a community of interest around just transitions — climate action is about decolonisation, about feminism, about anti-racism, about diversity and democracy. Many of us felt we wanted to deepen our understandings of climate justice, to share in one another’s research, and to reach out to colleagues and fellow travellers outside of DH.
Lobbying, influencing, and offering support and expertise — especially within our universities, and in our relationships with major funders. There was also some interest in other stakeholder groups (key suppliers, green investor coalitions, people responsible for league tables and excellence frameworks, etc.).

My own breakout rooms focused mostly on that final theme. We spent quite a lot of the conversation on funders (representatives from whom were in attendance). We all acknowledged the need for a collaborative and joined-up approach, feeding our perspectives into the work funders are already doing.

At the same time, there is also a fairly clear short-term ask here: we want prominent assurances that bids are not going to be disadvantaged for devoting some of their precious word counts to environmental impacts, and that budget lines related to mitigating environmental impact are legitimate. Everybody’s hunch is that this is already the case, but it’s good to have it said out loud, while the medium-term processes such as updating funder guidelines grind into gear. There is plenty to figure out. But the next few years are crucial from a climate perspective, and bids going in today or tomorrow are impacting what we might be doing in 2022-2025. To keep them aligned with the 1.5 degrees ambitions, some interim incentives will be handy.

As we flowed from our break-out groups into plenary discussion, another theme that emerged was work. We’re long past the point where managing climatic impacts could be seen as a ‘nice to have’ piece of work bolted onto the side of business-as-usual, if there happens to be some extra time and energy to devote there. But at the same time, we need to be sensitive to the diverse levels of capacity. We need to watch out for replicated or otherwise unnecessary work. Where possible activities should be folded into things that already exist. Progress can be made asynchronously to reflect busy calendars. And where we can, we should tune into the ways this work can be collectively nourishing, fascinating, and energising.

So what are the next steps? Broadly, to sort ourselves into teams to try to action things over the next six months or so, and see how we get on with that. Also to continue to reach out to others. These activities probably need to be organised under an umbrella of some kind. How do you like the ring of a Digital Humanities Climate Coalition?

The workshop winds up. One by one they go back to their lives, till I am alone in the Zoom room. A surreptitious glance over my shoulder, then I gleefully get out my gas-guzzling leaf vidaXL Petrol Backpack Leaf Blower and get the Google Jamboard in my gun sights. Post-its dance like confetti. One flies up that escaped my attention earlier.

“The world is burning. It is already too late without massive systematic top-down changes forced on us that no politician will want to do. Let’s all write nihilistic poetry and embrace the end.”

I feel that too. Of course it goes straight into the spreadsheet: WILLING TO LEAD OR CO-LEAD NIHILISTIC POETRY AND END-EMBRACING WORKING GROUP.

But it also drives home for me one last theme: the importance of mid-scale action. When we focus too much on what the individual can do — buying zippy little electric car, or the Correct Broccoli — it fails to engage with the scale of the challenge. When we focus too much on the big big shifts — system change! Degrowth! An end to extractivist ontologies! — the concepts have all the necessary oomph, but the concrete actions prove elusive.

The middle scale, the often distinctly unpoetic activity of organising with a few others to influence an organisation, a sector, a community of practice, a regulation or practice, is often what goes missing. The small scale and the big scale are still important, of course! And climate actions at many different scales feed and reinforce one another. Nihilistic poetry and end-embracing can even be part of that …

But the reason it felt like a very good workshop was that it was satisfyingly in-the-middle. Hope can be a feeling, but hope isn’t exclusively a feeling. Hope is also what you do. And often it’s things you do with a few other people that most manifestly are hope. Interventions with two or three other collaborators, or a dozen, or twenty, exploring what might be accomplished, and multiplying the tales of the attempts.

If you are involved in any way with Digital Humanities and were not at the workshop, please feel free to reach out. Some ways to get involved: email j.w.baker@soton.ac.uk and ask about the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition; sign the Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis manifesto; contribute to the growing crowdsourced list of resources (and wishlist).

This post mirrored at Southampton and Edinburgh.

Sustainability and Resilience at Sussex

These are just a few notes from the Sustainability and Resilience at Sussex panel I was fortunate enough to participate in yesterday, part of the Sussex Library Staff Conference.

Chloe Anthony, a doctoral researcher in environmental law at Sussex (researching the impact of Brexit), introduced the work of Brighton Permaculture Trust (including a variety of permaculture courses, plus events like Green Architecture Day). Chloe gave us a crash course in the history and philosophy of permaculture, and the applications of permaculture design both in everyday life and more specifically in academic projects. The three permaculture ethics of “earth care, fair share, and people care” are not one-size-fits-all dogmas, she explained, but rather tools for thinking through particular sustainability puzzles, which bristle with distinctive detail at the local level. Chloe also touched on themes such as working with nature rather than against it; responding imaginatively to change and working where possible with what is available or becomes available in the world around you; eliminating waste; using renewables; creating closed loops of energy and resources; valuing diversity both as an intrinsic good and for the resilience that diversity can bring; and creating beneficial connections among the diverse elements of your system, integrating rather than rigidly segregating and pigeonholing.

Claire Sumners runs the campaign Plastic Free Seaford. She talked us through her own growing awareness of plastics: from having never given much thought to what plastic is made of, or how long it sticks around in our ecosystems, to becoming an environmental activist and educator herself. Getting Seaford certified as a ‘Plastic Free Town’ didn’t mean hitting some kind of literal zero waste target, but but rather unlocking a set of achievements to support ongoing transformative work. For Claire this has involved starting conversations with businesses, schools, politicians, and other stakeholders. One thing sounded out loud and clear: the importance of taking action at many scales, simultaneously. Addressing the environmental emergency means advocating for system change at the global and national level, and being open-minded and imaginative about new ways of doing things at the ‘middle’ scale of sectors, institutions and organisations, and making those many smaller changes in our everyday lives. In fact, as society as a whole transitions to net zero, actions at all these different levels should start to complement each other more and more.

I also detected in Claire’s talk a real subtext (maybe it was more than a subtext!) of meeting people where they are, and then giving them the support and encouragement to take a couple steps in a new direction. A not insignificant part of the work of coping with the climate emergency is affective labour: the work of listening, empathisizing, the work of storytelling and worldmaking.

In my bit (slides here) I introduced SHL and our recent Sussex Humanities Lab’s 2020 Environmental Strategy. SHL’s plans for 2021 include a more fine-grained scoping review of the sustainability work and priorities of DH centres (and adjacent) across the sector, so watch this space! I also elaborated on one or two points from the Strategy document. For example:

Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) and geoengineering play an important role in climate modelling and policy in every future scenario seriously considered by the IPCC. Yet it seems like they’re not really talked about outside of this ‘big picture’ context, for example, when we think about our sustainability plans as individuals, institutions, and local communities. So I think it’s important we cultivate a rich critical awareness of climate technologies, and become literate in the issues and uncertainties, so we can make robust decisions and protect ourselves the risks of Net Zero on paper only.
Obviously there are many different routes to Net Zero, and it’s also important we don’t elide their political differences in the drive to get there speedily and efficiently. In other words, it’s not just about “us” getting to Net Zero as fast as “we” can (although obviously it’s time to get a move on). It’s also about recognising that resources and responsibilities are unequally spread, and that different decarbonisation strategies spread the costs and the benefits in different ways. This is just the kind of critical thinking, I suggest, which humanities academics can often bring to the table … although of course it’s also something we all can and should be thinking about!

Samantha Waugh, Sussex’s Sustainability Manager, then gave a very useful overview of where the university is at and where we might be heading. A new Sussex-wide strategy is in the works (publication in the spring), structured around four themes, mapped to the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. There was a lot of great detail (albeit some of it necessarily a bit provisional): here’s my (probably slightly unreliable!) summary …

Sam kicked off with strategic drivers: how is the environmental crisis is manifesting at the institutional level? This includes of course the global context: all the ways that our understanding of the environmental crisis is expressed and contested across scientific research, grassroots activism, and national and transnational policy contexts. Another significant piece of the global context is the pandemic itself, the risks and opportunities it has created, what it has accelerated or put on hold, what it has made more visible or less visible. Some relevant drivers have a more specifically Sussexy flavour: we are lucky in that our staff and student communities generally already have a deep personal commitment to social and ecological justice, and passion and impatience to make the necessary changes. NSS scores are one window into those student priorities. We also have really world-leading expertise in Development Studies, with all the opportunities and obligations that implies. More generally, we need to ensure our sustainability policy and practices are fully alligned with our Sussex 2025 vision.

With that in mind, the four threads are:

Interdisciplinary Development. Sustainability will be embedded throughout the curriculum, in particular via a flagship first year module in each school. It will also be embedded in our employability strategy. Interdisciplinarity also means recognising that sustainability is also about environmental justice, so this theme is also likely to be where a large chunk of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion work sits. There are tremendous opportunities here for collaborating with our passionate and brilliant student body to drive transformation, creating spaces, solidarity, and support to test out more radical ideas.
Decarbonisation. Our decarbonisation strategy is also in the works, and will include SMART targets for achieving Net Zero by a particular date. Will it be 2035? Maybe earlier? Some modelling has been commissioned which should give us a clearer idea early next year. There are questions of course around how decarbonisation will be incentivised and monitored across the sector and the UK economy more generally, and the potential for Sussex to show pre-emptive regulatory alignment. But there’s also the potential for leadership: this could be another area for creative exploration, innovation and social and commercial entrepreneurship. Sam hopes to put in place prizes for green innovation, support for spin-offs from research, and so on. Other priority areas to look at are buildings, facilities and construction, and flexible and remote work policies. Sam reinforced the point that the carbon implications of flexible and remote working may be more complex and mixed than they at first seem, and the importance of taking an open-minded and holistic view as we steer through these transformations.
The Civic Leaders and Partners theme is about our engagement, outreach, and collaborations, including charity partnerships. So this relates to the UN Sustainable Development Goals of good health and wellbeing; sustainable cities and communities; peace, justice, and strong institutions; and that final goal which is to pursue all the others through partnerships and collaborations. For Sussex this means, among other things, a sustainable and active travel action plan, and a sustainable procurement policy and practice. Sussex must use our influence with suppliers and other strategic partners to normalise a society of ecological sustainability and personal and collective wellbeing, including ensuring partners have their own appropriate Net Zero commitments and plans in place, that they pay a living wage, and so on.
Environmental Champions. The fourth thread of our strategy maps to the UN Sustainable Development Goals of clean water and sanitation, responsible consumption and production, life below water and life on land. There will very shortly be published (probably already out) an initial benchmarking exercise, ahead of a sustainable food and waste action plan and biodiversity policy and action plan. The initial targets will be to be in the top quintile of performers.

Sam also shared a provisional timeline with a number of milestones, including sustainability committee subgroups to launch in December 2020, a net zero commitment to be announced in spring 2021, and sustainability to be integrated into the curriculum in time for the 2022 intake.

There followed one of those lovely rich Q&A sessions which you know could have gone on much, much longer, but which you also don’t mind ending, because you know these conversations will still be flourishing long after the Zoom window winks shut.

Notes:

Sensory Cartographies

This Monday SHL hosted a fascinating artist talk from Jonathan Reus and Sissel Marie Tonn. Jonathan and Sissel explored a wide sense of mapping far beyond two dimensional diagrams of territories, and took us through recent and ongoing artistic projects, exploring the use of wearable technologies to augment, expand, refilter and transform sensory experience.

The Zoom recording of the seminar is also available here, and you can explore the Research Catalogue exposition here.

Urban Algorhythms

On Monday, SHL was lucky enough to have Prof Shannon Mattern visit the virtual lab for a fascinating seminar on ‘Urban Algorhythms.’ Shannon’s talk situated contemporary and emerging practices of macro-scale listening within a broad historical frame, tracing a genealogy from diagnostic auscultation, and articulated and explored some of the tricky ethical and epistemological questions around sonic surveillance and the stewardship of the city’s many dynamic ecologies and systems.

A recording of the seminar is available here, and you may also be interested in this recent article in the journal Places.

Prof Shannon Mattern’s research and teaching address how the forms and materialities of media are related to the spaces (architectural, urban, and conceptual) they create and inhabit. She writes about libraries and archives, media infrastructures, the material qualities of media objects, media companies’ headquarters and sites of media-related labor, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, and mediated sensation. She is the author of The New Downtown Library; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is a professor of anthropology at The New School in New York City. Twitter: @shannonmattern.

This event was part of the SHL lockdown seminar series. Please also join us on 1 June for Jonathan Reus and Sissel Marie Tonn on ‘Sensory Cartographies.’