Feeling the Ocean. Cfp RGS 2024 on co-creative science+art+activism experimentations.

[cover photo G.Lupinacci]

We invite abstracts for the Royal Geographical Conference 2024 in London on the following session topic. The sessions is sponsored by the Coastal and Maritime Research Group.The session is co-organised and chaired by Chiara Certoma (University of Rome La Sapienza), Federico Fornaro (Raw-News), Stefania Benetti (University of Eastern Piedmont), Antonella Passani (T6-Ecosystem)

The session focuses on how the combination of science, art and participatory processes can contribute to exploring and establishing a connection between society and the ocean. Our interest goes to transectorial and transdisciplinary-inspired artistic and creative processes promoted by scientists, artists, activists, seagoing people and ocean-lovers that experiment with new forms of investigation and expression to explore to motivate, trigger and support our commitments toward ocean challenges. Particularly we focus on participatory or collaborative artistic and creative processes on the belief that that engagement can bring about a deeper understanding and commitment of society with ocean hazards and challenges, not only via cultural consumption, but also in experimenting with artistic/performing arts themselves.

We are, however, not only interested in these processes per se (and), but also in how art and creative processes can enhance social and natural science research on the ocean, building upon the experience of our discussion group SAP&O. We are interested in how different scientific theories, findings, and methods can be elaborated and shared via artistic creations and co-creative experimentations, and how multiple means and forms of expression (i.e. film, photos, staged performances, digital creations, etc.) can be used to produce collaborative scientific storytelling, science-in-action stories, and emotionally impactful outputs. Embodied and embedded perspectives, from the inside and below narrative approaches able to both describe and stimulate interest and fascination on the scientific aspects of the ocean and society relationships, together with showing the knowledge and art-in-the-making are welcome.

This session is organised in the form of a workshop, accepting multimodal forms of presentation (exhibition, showcase, short performance, production-on-stage, storytelling, etc.). We are particularly interested in oceanic socio-spatialities (Chen et al. 2013; DeLoughrey 2017); the more-than-human kins that occur at the sea (Haraway, 2016); the more-than-wet ontologies (Peters & Steinberg, 2019); the turbulences, liquidities and temporalities of the ocean (Steinberg & Peters, 2013); the recombinant marine ecologies (Brennan, 2022; Buchan et al., 2023), and in general contributions that sit within critical ocean studies, oceanic turn and marine social science field.

We kick-off the event with a video showing the activities and the-making-of the “SeaPaCS_Participatory Citizen Science against Marine Pollution” (Fornaro&Lupinacci, 2023) and the catalogue “Making Science Public” (Lupinacci et al. 2023), and the photographic exposition “Oceanic Assemblages. Underwater nature-culture entanglements” by Giuseppe Lupinacci/Raw-New.

Contributors are invited to register with an Expression of Interest by deadline of Monday 26 February, to chiara.certoma@santannapisa.it and stefania.benetti@uniupo.it or using the RGS Annual Conference online system ‘Ex-Ordo’ and clicking on the ‘submit to panel’ button for this session https://ac2024.exordo.com/submissions/panels/53/new-contribution

More details on the conference, including the open call for papers, are available here.