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

我们认为，我们这个时代的主要社会问题需要相互联系，合作努力，创造性地和富有想象力地解决人类与生态关系的风险，不稳定性，不确定性和快速变化的步伐。气候科学家继续警告危险的气候变化的影响。社会科学家和政策制定者寻求能够促进更好的科学-公共交流、更大的社区复原力和社会可持续性的替代战略。越来越多的艺术家开始考虑放弃审美自主的概念，转而寻求利用艺术品的想象力和情感潜力来促进对不同生态和环境未来的追求。我们会建立一个跨学科的协作网络，将艺术、人文学科与社会科学结合起来，以制定富有创意和想象力的研究策略和方法，研究C21国家的环境风险经验，以及应对这些风险所需的变革。该网络的实质重点将放在归巢过程上：即空间和时间上动态的“在家”方式。我们希望研究家园在促进关怀、依恋和安全叙事方面的可能作用，这些叙事为人们和社区提供了一种生态认知感，以及人们可以在不同的空间和时间尺度上将地点和身份联系在一起的各种行动支持联系。我们相信这将提供富有洞察力的策略，为可持续发展实践和可持续场所建设开辟思路。对于学者和艺术家来说，归家的过程通常涉及身体和感官世界之间界限的重新配置：因此，人们在日常生活中对周围环境——对他们所处的地方——所给予的具体化的、富有想象力的关注是相当重要的。在定性社会科学的解释传统中也发现了类似的焦点，它长期以来一直在产生对日常生活的理解，这些理解来自于对经验感官知觉的体内调查，以及人们在近距离观察日常生活时产生意义的有条理的方式。然而，尽管艺术（尤其是戏剧和表演）最强调身体（感知），但解释性社会科学产生了可识别的知识，即人们在情境遭遇中建立有意义的、情感的联系，并将其嵌入当地文化、社区和更广泛的社会关系（意义构建）。我们需要更多地了解日常的情感过程是如何跨越既定的时空界限的。我们的艺术-社会科学网络将以新的方式将我们不同的学科方法结合在一起，以研究归巢的过程，并以创造性的研究策略和方法为特色，探索感知和意义构建。我们将重点关注这为跨越不同时间和地点的生态思维提供的理解。在一年的时间里，我们将通过共同努力，批判性地欣赏彼此的作品，并与当地艺术家、政策制定者和其他利益相关者社区（包括创意艺术产业）建立伙伴关系来实现这一目标。在此期间，我们将参与合作活动和事件。我们还将安排一系列由环境思想家和艺术家在卡迪夫哲学咖啡馆介绍他们的工作（包括展示和讲述活动，以展示艺术表演）。今年年底，我们将举办一次世界咖啡风格的包容性会议，并制作一份可访问的报告，分发给我们的非高等教育合作伙伴。我们会透过会谈、简报会和访问伙伴机构的方式，传播合作的成果。

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.