Title: Revitalising embodied community knowledges as leverage for climate change engagement

Abstract

Human survival is threatened by climate breakdown and ecological collapse. This levies huge responsibility on society to address how present modes of living have created this threat. Yet the scale of these crises and lack of wisdom to act can be overwhelming, so how will citizens become more informed and motivated to act? This paper proposes that cultivating communities of practice (Wenger) around low carbon citizenship can help generate discrete engagement strategies that rouse public attention towards changing attitudes and behaviours. Affective engagements are relatable, values-oriented and framed towards the priorities, knowledges, capacities, and lived experiences of participants. Such an approach is explored in the case study, Grow Your Own Community, that sought to engage marginalised communities with decarbonisation activities through the strategic repositioning of their embodied community knowledge (ECK). This community of practice helped to motivate and mobilise local participation by integrating Carbon Literacy with the situated, practical capacities that already lay within the community. Key findings reveal that revitalising a community’s existing body of knowledge to engage people with climate change knowledge creates the conditions for generating community-led mitigative action.

Biography

Laura Donkers is an ecological artist and researcher specialising in changing perceptions of climate change through creativity and co-production. She holds a BFA Hons in Fine Art, MFA in Art, Society, Publics, and PhD in Contemporary Art Practice. Laura Donkers Practice-led PhD research was carried out at University of Dundee and awarded AHRC Creative Economies studentship. She has received several awards to develop research opportunities in Aotearoa New Zealand. She successfully delivered a series of the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund decarbonisation projects that encouraged local food production and waste reduction. These projects integrated local traditional knowledge on growing food with methods of delivery that reflected embodied societal structures. New ground was created in terms of how the community influenced project development promoting a new vision for co-created community working practices, leading to improved climate change engagement at all levels of local society – schools, local community groups, local organisations, businesses.