Environmental Futures Dialogue Network

The Environmental Futures Dialogue Network was built as a social science-arts network within Wales and beyond to directly address questions such as:

• Can social scientists, arts scholars and artists work together to develop creative and imaginative strategies to address some of the major environmental risks that face us in the 21st Century? 
• Is it possible to develop cross-disciplinary ways of working to promote ideas about ways of making possible the changes that are necessary in order to deal with the risks and uncertainties involved for people and their communities, and the rapid pace of change in human-ecological relationships?  
• Can artists and social scientists envisage possibilities for living with the environmental transformations that are already under way, and to help promote ways of creating more sustainable lives, places and futures?

Visit the network's website for more information.

Aims

The network's aims are to:

• enable social scientists, arts scholars and artists to work together to foster intellectually and culturally creative work - also involving people and communities - on ways of making sense of uncertainties, ambiguities, dangers and risks posed by natural resource depletion, climate change and environmental transformation
• elucidate contested meanings of sustainability (including sustainable energy), and consider how 'sustainability' operates as a set of scientific, political, ethical and arts discourses
• explore how and why arts scholars, and artists who are producing and performing works on the theme of sustainability, promote awareness of the importance of the aesthetic value of those artworks
• develop cross-disciplinary ways of working so that artists, arts scholars and social scientists can envisage and promote generative, future-oriented actions and activities that are capable of contributing to more sustainable lives and place-making.