The Role of Immersive Embodied Participatory Techniques in Eco-Social Change
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sussex
Department Name: Sch of Engineering and Informatics
Abstract
The fellowship addresses a pressing question of methods to promote future-orientated thinking in relation to climate breakdown. Creative practitioners are increasingly using immersive and embodied participatory techniques, such as role-play, to help people imagine different futures and how these might be achieved, in response to the multiple crises facing the planet. These techniques involve invoking new relations with the world and with each other, intended to inspire a sense of agency, stimulate imagination and promote different kinds of sustainability. Yet little is known about how the design and structure of such 'experiences' create effects. This research uses fine-grained interviewing and observation techniques to explore, with leading practitioners, how these embodied encounters might be working to engage people, how they link personal meaning-making to global issues, and which aspects of embodied, immersive and participatory engagements work best to inspire change across which contexts.
With failures of leadership in addressing climate and other ecological crises, there is an 'urgent need to understand how to imagine and enact cultural change' (creaturesframework.org/index.html) and find new mechanisms for societal transformation. The research explores people's feelings and ideas - moment by moment - when they experience role-play (and related immersive embodied 'experiences') designed to change their eco-social orientation, agency and ideas for action. Arts and humanities initiatives that channel affective experience in the service of transformation are gaining momentum because they can offer hope and new pathways for action, inspiring deeper reorientation than information from science alone can. Different alternative futures can be designed and presented through immersive play, affecting people's sense of potential and provoking sensorial, relational, embodied and/or emotional encounters with possibilities. The fellowship research will explore these visions of change and how their design - to enable people to imagine difference by experiencing it - can best be worked into types of immersive situations.
By gathering and analyzing accounts from people who have been involved in four locale-based activities (Sussex coast, London Borough of Camden, Suffolk coastal town, Scottish region), it will be possible to derive pointers for designing experiences that help neighbourhoods relate to global challenges, understanding more of the personal elements such encounters inspire and drawing out the commonalities that make such work possible to apply more broadly. This creates new knowledge about the potential of arts-informed methods to perform cultural change and suggests how personal responses, collective change in neighbourhoods and managing global crises can come together in fruitful ways. It will also serve to deliver the kind of detailed research that shows the arts and humanities have an important role to play in creating sustainable and liveable futures, beyond the technical, to look at how lives can be made meaningful at a time of multiple threats.
The development component involves two secondments with policy makers to support the fellow's learning. This will give insight into decision-makers priorities, while, at the same time, having impact and learning how impact can be furthered. The engagement component brings research and development together in the commissioning a short immersive participatory workshop to be toured, to capture and share learning from the fellowship about transformative practices at micro-level and their relations to global challenges. The work will be showcased as essays, a book and a short workshop 'taster' of the relevant experiential learning.
With failures of leadership in addressing climate and other ecological crises, there is an 'urgent need to understand how to imagine and enact cultural change' (creaturesframework.org/index.html) and find new mechanisms for societal transformation. The research explores people's feelings and ideas - moment by moment - when they experience role-play (and related immersive embodied 'experiences') designed to change their eco-social orientation, agency and ideas for action. Arts and humanities initiatives that channel affective experience in the service of transformation are gaining momentum because they can offer hope and new pathways for action, inspiring deeper reorientation than information from science alone can. Different alternative futures can be designed and presented through immersive play, affecting people's sense of potential and provoking sensorial, relational, embodied and/or emotional encounters with possibilities. The fellowship research will explore these visions of change and how their design - to enable people to imagine difference by experiencing it - can best be worked into types of immersive situations.
By gathering and analyzing accounts from people who have been involved in four locale-based activities (Sussex coast, London Borough of Camden, Suffolk coastal town, Scottish region), it will be possible to derive pointers for designing experiences that help neighbourhoods relate to global challenges, understanding more of the personal elements such encounters inspire and drawing out the commonalities that make such work possible to apply more broadly. This creates new knowledge about the potential of arts-informed methods to perform cultural change and suggests how personal responses, collective change in neighbourhoods and managing global crises can come together in fruitful ways. It will also serve to deliver the kind of detailed research that shows the arts and humanities have an important role to play in creating sustainable and liveable futures, beyond the technical, to look at how lives can be made meaningful at a time of multiple threats.
The development component involves two secondments with policy makers to support the fellow's learning. This will give insight into decision-makers priorities, while, at the same time, having impact and learning how impact can be furthered. The engagement component brings research and development together in the commissioning a short immersive participatory workshop to be toured, to capture and share learning from the fellowship about transformative practices at micro-level and their relations to global challenges. The work will be showcased as essays, a book and a short workshop 'taster' of the relevant experiential learning.
