Artworks 4 Sustanability

Course Description

Across the globe humans face the challenge of building successful livelihoods, ones that not only bring them financial security and stability, but enhance their capabilities and provide them with other important aspects of well-being, be it good health, happiness, identity, and/or belonging. Such pursuits are arguably taking place in increasingly complex, dynamic, inter-connected and challenging environments. Population pressure, climate change, resource depletion, are only some of the forces pushing us to find innovative ways to adapt to changing ecologies, enhance livelihood resilience, and ensure a continued productive and healthy resource base.

In the Netherlands, for example, farmers and fisherman on the Wadden islands (a UNESCO natural world heritage site) are trying to find ways to retain their coastal livelihoods while accommodating growing tourism and a strong conservation movement aimed at mitigating the threats posed by mining, gas drilling and infrastructure developments. Meanwhile in The Hague, residents fight against physical and cultural displacements in the face of demographic changes, urban renewal policies, and complicated processes of gentrification.

If we want to play a part in facilitating and protecting sustainable livelihoods, be it in an urban metropolis or rural coastal village, we need to understand livelihood systems, the complex relationships between humans and the environments they inhabit or make use of.

Anchored in environmental anthropology and the approaches of cultural, political, and ethnoecology, this field course will train students in field methods; in innovative, participatory, playful and self-reflective methodological approaches and techniques to study human-environment interactions. While we will focus on applying such techniques to questions around sustainable livelihoods and how people engage with, make meaning from, and adapt to the environment, this field methods orientation can be applied to any field and any topic. It is designed for students from all majors.

Students will learn how to approach the field, with attention paid to the ethics of fieldwork and data collection as well as how to enter and be in the field, making use of all of our senses and taking the time to process and self-reflect on our integration and our learning. There is a strong focus in this course on art activism and the use of art and artistic techniques to not only provide insight into conceptualizations of sustainable livelihoods but also to advocate for them. Through this artistic lens we will focus on having fun in fieldwork and on playful ways to learn and listen and connect with people in new fields of inquiry and new spaces. We will try to bring out the inner artist in you.

The field methods of focus will include (participant) observation, drawing, social mapping, interviewing, and reflective journaling. The course will highlight the value of innovative, creative, mixed-method and participatory approaches.

One of the main assignments will be to experience and study artistic works in the city and at the Oerol festival and to develop new editions to the ArtWorks4Sustainable Livelihoods magazines. See last years’ edition are HERE. [Insert Link]