The Interdependence Day Project: Mediating Environmental Change

Abstract

This paper will reflect on the underlying motivations and tensions sitting behind a project generated by a partnership between the Open University’s Geography Department, Sheffield University’s Architecture Department and the new economics foundation (nef), that seeks to provoke and test re-framings of environmental change in the public sphere. The Interdependence Day project (ID) is a research, communications and participation project centred on taking a fresh tone and approach to issues around environment, development and globalization. ID is politically explicit, but frank about its experimental and uncertain status as a project. It has revolved around a distinctive mix of public events, publications, art practice and academic/policy seminars. These activities have started to probe the potency of the concept of interdependence for public understanding of and responses to environmental change at a moment when the density of relations between the ecological, the social and the political are so evident. The work has arisen out of an extended programme of action research on media and environmental change by one of the project partners Joe Smith, and in architectural design teaching, research and art practice by Renata Tyszczuk. The paper will reflect upon the usually implicit ethical and political commitments that researchers and participants are delivered into by dint of their ‘knowing about climate change’. It will say some provocative things about the distinctive responsibilities that the issue carries for research, art practice, interdisciplinarity and the politics of knowledge mediation.