Literary and Visual Landscapes Summer Symposium

In our polyvocal symposium, we wish to celebrate the many voices of LVL’s history, including speakers who have presented research, PGRs who have curated and hosted, and audience members who have asked questions and provoked discussion. We hope that as many of you as possible can join us to reconnect and continue the conversation.

Secondly, we want to explore what ‘polyvocality’ means in literary and visual landscape representations and research – and across environmental and humanities disciplines more generally. It is an idea central to much environmentally-associated inquiry, asking how we can recognise, listen to, and speak in many voices: across species, cultures, space, and time. It also highlights some of the challenges of literary and visual representations – how do we write and read with multiple voices? How do we see and make seen manifold perspectives? This symposium will be a multi-voiced conversation around these questions.

To that end, we are proposing a slightly alternative format for our symposium. Inspired by the rich conversations had at the recent CEH workshop ‘The Future of the Environmental Humanities’, our speakers will present provocations, or questions, to be put to the group for discussion. Each session will feature three such ‘provocateurs’, grouped around themes such as materialities, spaces and media.

In addition, as a core part of our symposium, we're delighted to be able to invite Angela YT Chan to deliver a workshop on 'Climate Landscapes: Strata of drawings, text and diagrams'. Angela is an independent researcher, curator and artist specialising in climate change. Her multidisciplinary work examines power in relation to the inequity throughout the colonial and ongoing history of the climate crisis, through self-archiving, data science, technologies, rethinking geographies and speculative fiction. Her recent research-art commissions use video, illustrations, conversations and other research media to focus on water scarcity, conflict and everyday experiences through climate framings and communications.

In this workshop, participants will explore how the breadth (processes on the earth’s surface) and depth (timelines) of our land- and waterscapes are impacted by climate change and the power structures that shape narratives. We will have prompted mind mapping activities through drawing, text-based and diagram making, and bring these together in our conversations. The aim will be to activate the ways we narrate the different strata of our climate landscapes, and create multimedia experiments that express our relations to them.

Plentiful refreshments will be available throughout the day, including lunch, coffee, tea and wine. After booking your ticket, we would kindly ask you to indicate if you have any specific dietary requirements by sending an email to [email protected].

We look forward to welcoming you!

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

University of Bristol Arts Complex, Room G.H01, 7 Woodland Road, Bristol, United Kingdom