The three-day event: Morecambe Milieux, Aqueous Futures at the historic art-deco Midland Hotel will gather together a diversity of voices, practices and perspectives from arts, sciences, local governance and communities— from university and other knowledge settings — in the muddy, soaked, interstitial environment of Morecambe Bay itself.
Attendance is free but registration is required.
The aim of this public event is to explore how different kinds of data and models are shaping environmental futures in vulnerable wet, marine and intertidal areas like Morecambe Bay. The purpose is to allow us to think critically about the techniques which produce this knowledge and their effects as well as alternatives. The event will explore the opportunities as well as the challenges of generating increasingly complex models of environmental processes and the relationship to environmental policy and decision-making. For example, it will consider how to reconcile abstract distanced perspectives associated with understanding planetary processes with grounded realities and lived experience in specific places. It is clear that, to date, policy responses to ecological crises have been insufficient, both globally and locally. Moreover, it is questionable whether even more information about or complex representations of causal processes will change this. How can experimental approaches from arts and design support other ways of knowing and producing knowledge with and for human and environmental systems? What possibilities may then emerge for enriching policy and governance practices?
The event is organised around the concept of “milieu” to provide a framework for encountering multiple cross-cutting issues at the same time (extended description of milieux here):
- The first milieu is suggested as a vibrant and diverse natural philosophy that understands the world as comprising a set of relations that are variously mediated in different ways. Thinking with this milieu may help to unpack existential uncertainty in the relationship between generating knowledge about environmental change and making judgements overhow to act on it. Historical Western models of environment and society are shifting with the designation of the Anthropocene — the label for the new human-made Earth system and geological era.
- The second is the milieu of norms, standards and established ways of thinking in gathering evidence and setting policy. Here the normative milieu of environmental governance is opened up.
- The third milieu is one of emplacement, as a lens to reflect on the environment and niches we and other creatures live and make our homes in. Creating knowledge actually from and for a place means considering details and nuances about habits, culture, history and social life that often get cleaned out of abstract data profiles.
Our meeting will create a site for civic and academic engagement and a public forum for knowledge-sharing amongst researchers, artists, place-based professionals and communities. It will create a dialogue between Morecambe Bay and other examples from different and aligned contexts, into the development of and implications arising from digital and other data challenges at varied scales of environmental science and management.
Our place-based enquiries of the Bay will be situated within the wet milieu of the Bay itself. From the historic Midland Hotel in the centre of Morecambe, we will be swept into the lunar rhythms of the intertidal Bay, intermittently revealing the largest biodiverse mud flats in England and the open water of the Irish Sea. We will likely witness early arrivals from the Arctic of over-wintering wading birds as we simultaneously look over the adjacent plot of earth being prepared for construction of the tourist attraction Eden North. We will collectively metabolise the energy and labours of multiple human and non-human communities of the region as we convene to meditate on and mediate the milieux and aqueous futures of this and other vulnerable coastal and wet intertidal landscapes.
Experimental methodologies beckon that can illuminate, clarify, inspire and intervene in the planetary place-making effects of the Anthropocene. Morecambe Milieux will host two days of panel conversations, artistic showcases and out-door experiences at the Midland Hotel and on the Bay itself between the 6th and 7th of September 2023 while the AHRC Aqueous Futures symposium will be a full-day workshop for arts and design practitioner-researchers on the 8th September.
