Homing in: Sensing, sense-making and sustainable place-making (an arts and social sciences collaborative network)

We argue that the major societal problems of our time require interconnected, collaborative efforts to creatively and imaginatively address the risks, instabilities, uncertainties and rapid pace of change in human-ecological relationships. Climate scientists continue to warn of the effects of dangerous climate change. Social scientists and policy makers seek alternative strategies capable of promoting better science-public communications, greater community resilience and social sustainability. Increasingly artists are concerned to relinquish notions of aesthetic autonomy and instead seek to use the imaginative and affective potentiality of artworks to promote the quest for different ecological and environmental futures.

We will set up a collaborative cross disciplinary network combining the arts and humanities with the social sciences that will be conducive to developing creative and imaginative research strategies and methods for studying experiences of environmental risks in the C21 and the transformative changes needed to respond to them. The substantive focus of the network will be on processes of homing: i.e. spatially and temporally dynamic ways of "being at home". We wish to investigate the possible role of homing in promoting the kinds of narratives of care, attachment and security that provide people and communities with a sense of ecological knowing, along with the kinds of action-enabling connections people can make linking place and identity together at different spatial and temporal scales. We believe that this will provide insightful strategies opening out ways of thinking about sustainability practice and sustainable place-making.

For scholars and artists, processes of homing often involve a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the body and the sensory world: considerable importance is thus given to the embodied, imaginative attention people pay in their everyday lives to their surroundings - to the place they are in. A similar focus is found in interpretative traditions of qualitative social science with its long track record of producing understandings of everyday life that emerge out of in vivo investigations of empirical sensory perceptions and the textured ways in which people make meaning in everyday life when it is viewed close up. However, whereas the arts (in particular theatre and performance) place greatest emphasis on the body (sensing), interpretive social science produces recognisable knowledge of the practical ways in which people establish meaningful, affective connections in situated encounters and their embedding within local cultures, communities and wider social relationships (sense-making). We need to know more about how everyday affective processes that matter are capable of crossing over established space-time boundaries.

Our arts-social science network will bring our different disciplinary approaches together in new ways to investigate processes of homing and feature creative research strategies and methods for inquiring into sensing and sense-making. We will focus on the understanding this affords for ecological thinking as it spans across different times and places. We will do this both by working together to critically appreciate one another's work and engage in partnership working with local artists, policy and other stakeholder communities (including the creative arts industry) over the course of one year. During this time we will participate in collaborative activities and events. We will also schedule a series of presentations by environmental thinkers and artists about their work at the Cardiff Philosophy Café (to include show and tell events to demonstrate arts performances). Towards the end of the year we will conduct an inclusive conference in World Café style and produce an accessible report for distribution to our non HE partners. We will disseminate outcomes of our collaborative working through talks, briefings and visits to our partner organisations.

A key part of our case for support is that the excellence and impact of publically funded, University-based research can be increased by finding more creative, collaborative ways of working to produce and disseminate research outputs for a broader base of research beneficiaries. Our planned collaborative activities and events (local café events, World Café-style Conference) will widen public engagement between academics and groups and organisations outside the HE sector some of whom are formally listed as project partners. Groups/users of research who have already agreed to take part span performing artists and creative arts practitioners; local communities engaged in actions on climate change, low carbon energy and other sustainable community initiatives; NGOs, government policy makers and senior advisors to local authorities in the environment and sustainability sector. We have strategies in place to grow our network in appropriate ways as our work unfolds. We have designed into our work programme ways of ensuring that we include in our events members of the public who are not already actively involved as participants in local community or government sustainability initiatives. Working with our partners we will develop and curate a range of specific, knowledge development and practical implementation strategies suited for non-academic audiences so that users may take steps to promote their wider use beyond the organised events themselves. Digital/world wide web, textual and multimodal records of interactions generated - often by users themselves - in the course of our activities will be a means of capturing ephemera to encourage circulation of our activities among learning communities. These resources will be relayed to/replayed in other settings to create their own traces and legacies, serve as testimonies of involvement, and create new, demonstrable forms of knowledge capital. Our activities will encourage efforts that are already underway and establish new ways for local communities to contribute to meeting the challenges associated with global environmental change. Our particular focus will be on the ways in which such changes are becoming increasingly relevant to local communities and at the micro-level of people's everyday lives and routines. We will devise strategies working with the Welsh Government that will engage, rather than superficially communicate with, members of the public/communities by working to produce a briefing note drawing out the lessons from the World Café event for dissemination through our own and our partners' websites. These insights will be shareable with the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change/DECC and capable of informing important UK polices such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment. Our project will enable a range of research users to benefit themselves and others: this, in itself, amounts to a demonstrable route to impact. We will draw on and develop our existing connections within our University Institutes and across-UK networks while at the same time building further links with other UK-wide organisations by inviting them to our World Cafe event and disseminating project outcomes to them. Existing links with the AHRC's landscape and environment programme provides a highly appropriate pathway for our project to create wide impact through a major humanities research initiative. We will invite members from other networks such as Historic Weather Network and the Site, Performance and Ecology Network to join our activities and share knowledge with a view to developing further research impact and other research collaborations. We have taken steps to ensure that we will be able to promote an international dimension to our work by working with others who have this capacity and who have with a world-wide reputation for excellence. We will prioritise arts and social science (environmental/methodological) channels of influence, communications and knowledge exchange.