Architecture in times of climate crisis – selected aspects

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Animals on a grand scale are victims of climate change and of natural disaster. With no voice within human cultures, their plight can be silenced and forgotten once an extreme weather event is over and when media coverage of the devastation has ceased. The creative arts have an important role to play in raising public awareness of and empathy for animals impacted by natural disaster. This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the Australian play Fire by Scott Alderdice (2017), framed by Animal Studies perspectives. The voices of the animals in Fire, as expressed through language – dialogue and narration – are the focus of the analysis to determine how the play engages in the concepts of considering other-than-human interests; imagining and representing animals and their significance; personifying species’ presence using human speech to offset facelessness; and inspiring humans to take responsibility in this time of climate crisis and natural disaster. Fire provides an exemplar for theatrical expression giving voice to animals in times of crisis. An examination of the narration and dialogue of the animal characters reveals a respectful representation of native Australian animals, who are shown to be sentient and social beings intimately entwined with the environment in which they live. The language use by the animals throughout elicits recognition and empathy and subsequently feelings of grief and of guilt. The play inspires humans to take responsibility by considering animals’ perspectives and interests; understanding their significance in the world; and performing our role to protect the natural environment.

Land is not a commodity, and dominant western society is unsustainable. Examples of unsustainability include severance of peoples from lands and waters; separation of peoples from centers of decision-making; and dispossession of the lands, and traditional territories of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). IPLCs at the frontlines of the climate crisis are often excluded on vital decisions regarding land management and protection. Taking an emic interpretation by means of lived experiences and auto-ethnographic responses to question prompts, this paper explores the international implications of Anishinaabek Giikendaaswin and Dùthchas nan Gàidheal as concepts that can (re)center IPLC place-based knowledges, sustainable governance, and lands in times of climate crisis. Anishinaabek Giikendaaswin is about the learning from the lands, N’ibi (the waters), and the sky world. It is a lived knowledge that has guided and continues to guide Anishinaabek Peoples. G’giikendaaswinmin informs Anishinaabek interconnectedness and interrelationality to the lands, all beings, and the sky world. Dùthchas is a millenia-old kincentric concept, informing a Gàidheal (Gael) way of life and traditional land governance that predate the formation of the United Kingdom. Dùthchas transmits a sense of belonging to, not possession of the land, and stresses an interconnectedness and ecological balance among all entities. The authors (Anishinaabe and Gàidheal) respond to critical questions, such as How do Giikendaaswin and Dùthchas center knowledges that can ensure collective continuance of life? Through a common theme of interconnectedness and what this means for reconstitutive real-life practice, they demonstrate how Indigenous concepts and science based on the expertise of IPLCs can address continued colonial atrocities and current crises. Giikendaaswin and Dùthchas have international and transnational implications as discourses of resistance not only to the Anthropocene, but also to ongoing processes of dispossession.

In this publication, researchers from the social and economic sciences and medicine as well as practitioners from the media and politics reflect on the influence of scientific expertise in times of crisis. Differences and similarities between the Covid-19 pandemic, the financial and economic crisis, the refugee crisis and the climate crisis are elaborated. The interviews were conducted in November/December 2021.

Given the increasing prevalence of contemporary intersecting global and local crises that impact migrants and discourses of migration, this collated issue offers a timely and important analysis that brings together scholarship of migrant civic practices in times of crisis. The special issue covers instances of migrant contributions in local and transnational communities during a global pandemic, as well as ongoing crises that are global in nature yet have specific local manifestations (such as the climate crisis, the misrepresented European ‘refugee crisis’, the invasion of Ukraine, and diasporas created by persecution or economic inequality). The focus of the special issue generates alternative analyses to existing scholarship that tend towards emphasising migrant vulnerabilities during crises instead of exploring the agency of migrants. As the collection shows, migrants’ self-organising points to where there are structural or systemic inequities that have not been addressed by the state. Although the co-editors and a majority of the contributors are located in Australia, the collection spans the globe and contributes to scholarship in critical migration studies, cultural studies, sociology of migration, health, and media studies. It is framed as a vital intervention in migration studies, as the goal of this special issue is to re-frame migrant civic practices during crises as well as chart a future research agenda for more attention to the mobilising of migrants during crises manifest in everyday and mediated forms of civic practice.

Has there ever been a climate crisis? Or an economic crisis? Did these ever happen? Are they happening? 'Merry crisis and a happy new fear' - these words, spray painted outside the Bank of Greece in Athens, as that country erupted in riots in December 2008, seemed to say it so well. There is always another crisis, a new crisis. Enjoy your crisis. But also be scared. Since the crisis perpetuates fear. In this paper we want to critically interrogate the proposition that we live in a time of crisis. What is politically at stake in such claims, as rife as they seem to have become? How do they fold into processes of subjection and subjectivation, shaping our roles as citizens, workers, migrants, consumers, activists or investors? How does the declaration of a crisis amplify, modify or detract from the underlying conditions to which it seeks to draw attention? We ask these questions not simply because we are suspicious of the terminology that circulates in venues like The Economist or Time Maganne. Our investigation is also driven by the belief that the construction, interpretation and management of the present as a time of crisis locates individuals and populations as objects of particular strategies of governance. While we explore these strategies predominantly in relation to the discourses and practices surrounding the notion of climate crisis, we do not limit our analysis to this object or even understand the term 'climate' in an exclusively meteorological sense. To approach climate crisis as a construct is not to do the same as regards the warming of the earth's atmosphere or the depletion of the resources that have fuelled the development of global modernity. Indeed, it is the seriousness of this situation that motivates our inquiry and leads us to ask what is at stake in die invocation of crisis, or perhaps better, yet another crisis. To invoke the notion of crisis is to construct a particular injunction to judgement and action that establishes in itself the imperative for redressing that crisis. In crisis, as it is popularly noted, we find ourselves in a moment of danger and opportunity. Unsurprisingly, much of the current discourse on climate change oscillates between these two poles: most dramatically, between imminent catastrophe and the prospect of renewal; between unimaginable humanitarian disaster and the promise of a green-tech revolution. As such the climate crisis regularly calls forth regimes of risk, since it is notions of risk that work this line between danger and opportunity, between protection and profit. This essay's premise, that climate crisis shapes particular subjectivities, is built on the presupposition of the existence of a political economy of protection and profit that constitutes, as it constructs, that crisis. To interrogate the processes of subjection and subjectivation integral to this economy, the essay traces how the climate crisis becomes enfolded in existing logics that seek to manage contingency through risk; significantly, via those risk logics of security and securitisation by which global disorder and global direats have come to be imagined and managed in both the political and economic spheres.1 To tease out the logics of these risk regimes and investigate their modes of subjectivation this paper proposes a concept: the actuarial imaginary. This formulation provides the occasion to investigate how the subject of the ecological crisis is constituted not only in the rationalities of risk but also in the affective 'atmosphere' of societies in which risk has become a central technique of governance.2 To this end this essay proceeds in four parts. The first introduces the prevailing image of the subject of climate crisis as one oscillating between purposive reason and an avoidance of an encounter with the unimaginable. The second examines the rationalities of risk and their affective atmosphere that comes to shape the actuarial imaginary of the climate crisis. The third investigates how the strategies of security and securitisation that constitute and construct this imaginary are deployed in the prevalent claim that mobilisation against climate change demands a war footing; particularly as expressed in proposals for a green New Deal. …

The contribution at hand zooms in on—what the authors describe as—the double responsibility of news media in the climate crisis. It aims to, on the one hand, contribute to an extended understanding of news media CSR in times of the climate crisis, and on the other hand critically reflect on the limitations of CSR in the media industry. The contribution draws on literature at the intersection of CSR, the news media and the climate crisis, and empirical work that has looked into four major media corporations in Australia, India, the UK, and the USA, and their corporate responses to the climate crisis. The authors argue that since CSR operates within and adapts to an economic system whose pillars are largely unsustainable, CSR carries inherent limitations to constructively engaging with challenges posed by the multiple crises. Similarly problematic are the voluntary nature of CSR commitments, the resulting low public accountability, the divergence between intents and realization, the generic rhetoric of CSR documents, and the subordination of ethical goals to economic goals. Operating within the logic of an unsustainable economic system, including the continued strive for economic growth, CSR, thus, does not tackle the roots of the crises to which it aims to respond. As a consequence, the authors suggest a zoom out from the micro level towards the macro level, and propose a reorientation towards questions related to media regulation rather than placing trust primarily in voluntary self-regulation.

A Note from the Editor Susanne Shawyer Every summer I take a break from my regular commitments to reflect on the past academic year and to anticipate the months to come. My summer rest provides a welcome opportunity to assess my contributions as a theatre scholar, artist, and educator, and to consider the ways I would like to grow in the future. This year, my annual reflection feels more urgent than ever. The global pandemic persists. The climate crisis grows with frequent wildfires and record heat. In the United States, gun violence continues. Colleagues are burnt out. Students are anxious. Why do we continue to make theatre? How can performance scholarship benefit our communities? What is the value of art in times of crisis? This year I find answers to those questions not in the studio or on stage, but in the natural world. I watch with fascination as a spider busily spins its web outside my window. I hearken to the shrill song of cicadas, the gentle chirping of songbirds. I touch the rough bark of an oak tree and inhale its warm scent. Action. Music. Spectacle. As I connect to the natural performances around me, I am comforted. Bright blooms offer hope and a promise of renewal. Sticky summer air recalls other compelling outdoor performances. A Shakespeare in the Park interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm. A jingle dress dance at a powwow under bright blue sky. A giant puppet parade. A block party. These examples remind me of what I value most in performance: community, surprise, joy. What you value may differ. You may find your answers elsewhere, perhaps in a fresh cup of coffee, a lunch with friends, a new book, or a darkened auditorium. I hope that you can take some time while reading this issue of Theatre Topics to reflect on what you value and how you would like to grow in the year ahead. How can your theatre scholarship, artistry, or pedagogy reflect what matters most to you, your students, and your community? The articles and notes in this issue take up this question. They offer detailed and specific examples of how theatre-makers respond to the urgent demands of their communities while at the same time engaging with what they treasure most about performance. They reflect on what we have learned from the past few years, consider what we should keep, and advocate for what we can change. Each piece in this issue is a thoughtful meditation on the value of theatre in times of crisis. First, Mary Anderson and Richard Haley explore the "circumstantial aesthetics" of Michigan Opera Theatre's pandemic production of Twilight: Gods in a parking garage. They argue that the literal and metaphorical pandemic "bubbles" at play in this drive-through opera created a new mode of audience engagement, as drivers became co-producers in the autopoietic process of performance. As they reflect on the pleasure and pain that participatory theatre arouses in spectators, Anderson and Haley contend that innovative aesthetic experiments like this drive-through production can usefully reconfigure "our sense of time, space, and place." Using Michigan Opera Theatre's creative staging as a case study for pandemic ingenuity, the authors ask the reader to consider the aesthetic possibilities that crisis circumstances can inspire. In "Effective Dreaming in the Time of Zoom Theatre: Reflections on Directing The Lathe of Heaven," Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores insights gained from a pandemic pivot to Zoom theatre. Using a case study of a performance at Brandeis University in 2021, his article outlines how the pandemic demanded creative thinking that yielded rich discoveries about the production process. Questioning each step—from season selection to rehearsal norms, from technical decisions to finding [End Page vii] opportunities to collaborate—allowed Wooden to reconnect to his theatrical and pedagogical values and find fresh approaches to his artistic process. These new insights not only transformed his artistry and pedagogy during a time of crisis, but also offer the reader new ways of making theatre in our transforming world. In her note from the field, Ayshia Mackiestephenson describes her pedagogical One Love Method, created to empower students, encourage antiracist allyship, and resist white supremacy in higher education...

<p>Global emissions of CO<sub>2</sub> have been rising at 1–2% per year, and the gap between emissions and what is needed to stop warming at aspirational goals like 1.5ºC is growing. To stabilize warming at 1.5ºC, most studies find that societies must rapidly decarbonize their economy while also removing CO<sub>2</sub> previously emitted to the atmosphere. In response to these realities, dozens of national governments, thousands of local administrative governments, and scores of scientists have made formal declarations of a climate crisis that demands a crisis response. In times of crisis, such as war or pandemics, many barriers to policy expenditure and implementation are eclipsed by the need to mobilize aggressively around new missions; and policymaking forged in crisis often reinforces incumbents such as industrial producers. Though highly motivated to slow the climate crisis, governments may struggle to impose costly polices on entrenched interest groups and incumbents, resulting in less mitigation and therefore a greater need for negative emissions.</p><p>We model wartime-like crash deployment of CO<sub>2</sub> direct air capture (DAC) as a policy response to the climate crisis, calculating (1) the crisis-level financial resources which could be made available for DAC; (2) deployment of DAC plants paired with all combinations of scalable energy supplies and the volumes of CO<sub>2</sub> each combination could remove from the atmosphere; and (3) the effects of such a program on atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> concentration and global mean surface temperature.</p><p>Government expenditure directed to crises has varied, but on average may be about 5% of national GDP. Thus, we calculate that an emergency DAC program with annual investment of 1.2–1.9% of global GDP (anchored on 5% of US GDP; $1–1.6 trillion) removes 2.2–2.3 GtCO<sub>2</sub> yr<sup>–1</sup> in 2050, 13–20 GtCO<sub>2</sub> yr<sup>–1</sup> in 2075, and 570–840 GtCO<sub>2</sub> cumulatively over 2025–2100. Though comprising several thousand plants, the DAC program cannot substitute for conventional mitigation: compared to a future in which policy efforts to control emissions follow current trends (SSP2-4.5), DAC substantially hastens the onset of net-zero CO<sub>2</sub> emissions (to 2085–2095) and peak warming (to 2090–2095); yet warming still reaches 2.4–2.5ºC in 2100. Only with substantial cuts to emissions (SSP1-2.6) does the DAC program hold temperature rise to 2ºC.</p><p>Achieving such massive CO<sub>2</sub> removals hinges on near-term investment to boost the future capacity for upscaling. With such prodigious funds, the constraints on DAC deployment in the 2–3 decades following the start of the program are not money but scalability. Early deployments are important because they help drive the technology down its learning curve (indeed, in the long run, initial costs matter less than performance ceilings); they are also important because they increase the potential for future rapid upscaling. Deployment of DAC need not wait for fully decarbonized power grids: we find DAC to be most cost-effective when paired with electricity sources already available today: hydropower and natural gas with renewables; fully renewable systems are more expensive because their low load factors do not allow efficient amortization of capital-intensive DAC plants.</p>

The need to prepare school students to respond to the climate and environmental crises is rapidly rising up educational agendas nationally and internationally, but the role of the humanities, and particularly history, is often marginalised. In England, the main context of this article, the climate crisis does not appear on any official history curriculum documentation, reinforcing a separation of nature and culture. This is not surprising, given that the climate crisis in general has been engaged with so little in the humanities, but teaching climate change as a ‘science’ problem rather than a societal one risks exacerbating students’ anxieties and sense of powerlessness. By contrast, humanities subjects, including history, can furnish students with the knowledge and skills to respond in more constructive and critical ways to a crisis that they will experience more acutely than us. We acknowledge and welcome the work that is already underway in school history, but we also call for a greater urgency to reform history curricula and provide better support for teachers. Meanwhile, mindful of how painfully slow these processes can be, we also call on history educators and academics to take matters into their own hands and make changes within existing curriculum structures where possible.

Navigating climate crises in the Great Barrier Reef

The challenge of rapid climate change is forcing us to rethink traditional attitudes to nature. This book is the first study to chart these changing attitudes in 21st-century British fiction. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel examines twelve works that reflect growing cultural awareness of climate crisis and participate in the reshaping of the stories that surround it. Central to this renegotiation are four narratives: environmental collapse, pastoral, urban and polar. Bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with narratology and a new body of contemporary writing, Astrid Bracke explores a wide range of texts, from Zadie Smith’s NW through Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to the work of a new generation of novelists such as Melissa Harrison and Ross Raisin. As the book shows, post-millennial fictions provide the imaginative space in which to rethink the stories we tell about ourselves and the natural world in a time of crisis.

I will discuss in this article the COVID-19 implications on school communication with stakeholders in the inner and outer circles. This article’s starting point is that especially in crisis times, school communication is the key to development, maintenance and preservation. The article will refer to the school climate in crisis and teacher-student-parent communication. The first part will deal with crisis implications on school communication, harming communication processes and its new characteristics, as a transition from face-to-face communication to online communication and its implications. The second part will deal with the school climate in crisis and how this climate changes communication. Research shows that the stress resulting from crisis causes many hardships in the school climate and influences the welfare and resilience of those who are involved in the school communication process: students, teaching staff and parents. The third and last part will present communication models taken by schools in crisis and demonstrate the technological and social characteristics and patterns of its implementation, which repeats for schools in crisis. The summary will present general recommendations for effective school communication in crisis when it is recommended to adjust each communicational action plan to the school’s unique characteristics.

An interest in environmental humanities has been gaining momentum in recent years, with both scientific research and academic education experiencing dynamic growth. There is also a noticeable increase in civic engagement to protect forests from logging and rivers from further regulation. However, a significant challenge lies in the lack of adaptation of environmental humanities for application in the Polish school system. Addressing this gap is one of the challenges in contemporary education. In the book More-Than-Human Lessons in the Polish Language. Polish Education in Times of the Climate Crisis, I outline the possibilities of comprehensive transformations brought about by environmental analyses and interpretations that can be successfully applied in the Polish language classes. Environmental humanities, with its revisionist force, can alter the perception of the archaic literary canon, allowing a reinterpretation that unveils more-than-human history of the world and the creation of new narratives. The school should actively participate in weaving these transformative narratives, contributing to an "ecological metanoia". In times of climate and environmental crisis, we need new concepts, a new language, new stories, and new actions in education. These new actions can be translated into the process of unlearning dominant practices and styles conveyed by literature, including the school reading canon. "New" also suggests revisiting old issues with a fresh perspective and care for the Earth. The school should quickly provide opportunities for changing students' thinking, creating a new environmental imaginary beyond the nature-culture dualism and weakening anthropocentrism in favor of alliances that encompass more-than-human entities. It could also initiate a shift in societal thinking from further "cheap nature accumulation" to creating new systems based on symbiotic principles, as proposed by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, viewing nature as a gift rather than a commodity. The goal of this book is to explore how Polish language lessons can become a space for achieving "proecological metanoia", recognizing and seizing Kairos as the opportune moment to act for the Earth and all its inhabitants. Literature, art, and stories are still assigned too little role in the fight against climate change, and environmental humanities education lacks sufficient advocates and promoters in Poland. Yet, the Polish language, as a school subject, possesses suitable tools for spreading ecological values among the youth–cultural texts, literature, film, photography, sculpture–drawing on methodologies developed by the new humanities. These favorable conditions and the potential of humanistic sciences need to be utilized. In the book, I propose environmental interpretations of “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils” (Polish title: „Cudowna Podróż”) by the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, a book included in the optional reading canon of primary schools, as well as selected excerpts from mandatory readings–such as the description of Lithuanian forests in "Pan Tadeusz" and the narrative of objects and their treatment by humans in Andersen's fairy tale "Imbryk." Although the texts I selected have a solid foundation in historical-literary tradition and school reading methodology, I am interested in how they could resonate with natural sciences in the spirit of the new humanities, creating new symbiotic narratives in schools. The publication includes various environmental declarations that can be used in schools, such as the Declaration of Tree Rights, Declaration of Memory Rights for the Earth, World Charter for Nature, and Plant Rights Charter. Readers will also find a selection of environmental reportages that can be read in whole or in part during Polish language classes, along with chosen proposals from the latest fiction and popular science literature aimed at young readers.

This article employs a holistic understanding of environmental, social, and economic sustainability to explore the interaction between neoliberalism, climate crisis, digitalization, and academic work with a focus on its everyday aspects. Drawing our experience of organizing an online conference during the Covid-19 pandemic and our dialogue with conference participants, we first problematize the presumed disembodiment of digital exchange and suggest a nuanced understanding of physicality’s role in knowledge production. We then explore the impact of the changing times and spaces of academic work on bodies and minds and the boundaries between private and public realms. Finally, we challenge the notion of digital solutionism by highlighting the implications of inhabiting digital platforms as spaces for knowledge production. While there is no simple solution to the problems around the digital shift in academic work and conferencing, we argue, downsizing can be a counteraction to platform capitalism in times of the climate crisis.