The two overarching questions that the UAL Climate Action Plan provoked for me were ‘How can I discuss the scale of the climate emergency with students?’ and ‘How critical, and frankly honest, are we being if we’re encouraging colleagues and students to embed climate justice principles while the university continues to operate a business?’
Many arguments within the Climate Action Plan seemed to echo the Holmwood (2018) text we were recommended to read for this session, where the author questions the extent to which higher education curricula can be decolonised while universities remain profit-oriented.
The Plan includes some integral ideas regarding the climate justice movement – for example, the argument made by Rahul Patel (p. 38) on the need to recognise the critical intersection between decolonisation and decarbonisation. However, the call for UAL staff to ‘change the way we teach’ (p. 7) can’t help but appear to reproduce what Shove (2010, p. 1274) has critiqued as the ABC approach to climate governance (prioritising individual ‘attitude, behaviour, choice’ narratives), and what Rice (2014) has argued obfuscates much larger, more effective changes.
So how do I work with this Plan and its principles in my own context, in light of the conversation I shared with Tilly and Emily during the session? How can I work with my own feelings of contradiction here?
The most pragmatic and meaningful response to these questions for me is inviting our Y1/Y2 Fine Art students to emphasise/critique the scale and effectiveness of their offsite interventions in public space. Despite my interest in climate justice, this has been absent from the way I describe the purpose of the off-site show units, where the intended learning outcomes are to ‘activate [their] work and ideas publicly’, and ‘demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of [their] work’s relation to its wider professional context’. Why have I not previously encouraged students to explore ways of measuring or describing the ecological impact of their offsite shows on the environments they are set up in? Does this not get to the very heart of one of art’s prevailing quandaries – how it understands its role in the current political/ecological moment? Does it facilitate a deeply critical avenue for reaching these learning outcomes?
In this sense, despite my early cynicism, my engagement with the UAL Climate Action Plan has reframed these learning outcomes for me, and has provided a new way in which I can encourage students to ‘demonstrate… critical understanding of [their] work’s relation to its wider professional context’.
Holmwood, J. (2018) ‘Race and the Neoliberal University: Lessons from the Public University’ in Bhambra, G.K, Gebrial, D. & Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds.) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press. pp. 37-52.
Rice, J. L. (2014). ‘An Urban Political Ecology of Climate Change Governance’. Geography Compass. 8(6), pp. 381–394.
Shove, E. (2010). ‘Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change’. Environment and Planning A. 42(6), pp. 1273–1285.
University of the Arts London (UAL) (n.d) Climate Action Plan. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/374128/Climate-Action-Plan_.pdf (Accessed 23/02/23)