April 19–23, 2022, Hollyhock, Cortes Island
This symposium, convened by Erin Robinsong & Michael Datura, brought together writers, artists, activists, scholars, and educators engaged with geopoetics, an emerging constellation of creative practice at the nexus of poetics and geography. Over five days with seventy people, we engaged in dialogue with/in the land and sea, lead seminars, presented works, collaborated, and cross-pollinated. The symposium was followed by an arts residency.
We consider geopoetics in the context of settler-colonialism and climate chaos to share strategies for staying with some of the more troubling questions and realities of scholarship, education and art in the so-called Anthropocene. What role does imagination play in fostering new ecological/geographic paradigms? What lyric strategies amplify the role of more-than-human agents in public life? How do we grieve what we are losing while nurturing futures of multispecies flourishing? In a time of ecological precarity, this gathering offered space for rethinking and remaking relations with/in a more-than-human world.
Read about the program, the participants & the opening remarks Geopoetics in the Mess/Mesh by me here
Listen to the Future Ecologies podcast on Geopoetics, created and produced by Mendel Skulski from this event. The episode weaves together voices from the gathering in “a sympoietic stream of consciousness; on language, art making, and more-than-human interconnection.”
This event was made possible by generous support from
Carol Newell
Ginny Jordan
Ian, Victoria & Lucinda Watson
Bill Weaver & Siobhan Robinsong
Joel & Dana Solomon Fund
Mark & Sherry Deutschmann
SFU Institute for the Humanities
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council
Carol Newell
Ginny Jordan
Ian, Victoria & Lucinda Watson
Bill Weaver & Siobhan Robinsong
Joel & Dana Solomon Fund
Mark & Sherry Deutschmann
SFU Institute for the Humanities
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council