The Fight for Climate after Covid-19 - A Watch Party
2022-11-29 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/London) | Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9LE, United Kingdom
This is an opportunity for the EFI and its extended community to come together and join a live viewing of the online event, ‘The Fight for Climate after Covid-19: A conversation with Alice C. Hill‘ in a casual and relaxed atmosphere.

Technomoral Conversations: Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence
2022-11-21 18:00 - 19:00
What is the impact of AI on the planet? There are reasons to hope that data-driven efficiencies and insights can help produce innovative solutions to the climate emergency, touching areas such as energy, biodiversity monitoring and conservation, transportation, water conservation, and agriculture, among others. On the other hand, there are also real concerns about the climate cost of producing AI models in the first place. Researchers have found that training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes. Will AI turn out to be a net negative or a net positive for the sustainability of life on the planet?

Join us for a conversation on sustainability and AI, featuring a panel of experts who are tackling different facets of this challenge.

Speaker Biographies

Chair

Professor Shannon Vallor

Shannon Vallor is the Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is the Baillie Gifford Chair in Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She also holds an appointment in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy and chairs the University’s AI and Data Ethics Advisory Board. Shannon’s research explores the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies. Current projects focus on the impact of emerging technologies – particularly those involving automation and artificial intelligence – on the moral and intellectual habits, skills and virtues of human beings: our character.

Speakers

Mirella Lapata

Mirella Lapata is Professor of natural language processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on getting computers to understand, reason with, and generate natural language. She is the first recipient (2009) of the British Computer Society and Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS/IRSG) Karen Sparck Jones award and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the ACL, and Academia Europaea. Mirella has also received best paper awards in leading NLP conferences and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the Transactions of the ACL, and Computational Linguistics. She was president of SIGDAT (the group that organises EMNLP) in 2018. She has been awarded an ERC consolidator grant, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and a UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship.

Dr Ronita Bardhan

Dr Ronita Bardhan is Associate Professor of Sustainable Built Environment at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on data-driven design for built environments that respond by reducing health and energy burdens in the warming climate. She currently works on humid heat health and energy burdens due to the built environment design. Bardhan combines architectural engineering, AI and machine learning with social sciences to develop built environment design solutions. She has developed novel methods to inform building and city design by combining physics-based building design optimisation with qualitative socio-economic, socio-cultural norms, occupant behaviour and community norms data. She has conducted heat-health & energy research in diverse socio-economic settings in the United Kingdom, India, Ethiopia, South Africa, Indonesia etc. Bardhan specialises in data-driven design for developing context-specific solutions in the affordable housing sector. Bardhan is the Director of MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies (MAUS) and leads the Sustainable Design Group at the university. Her impactful work on developing design solutions for reducing the burdens of tuberculosis, heat health and poor indoor air quality in slum rehabilitation housing has received immense traction from policymakers. Bardhan currently advises government agencies on energy efficiency and heat health in affordable housing and has written over 130 academic articles on the health and environmental design of the affordable residential built environment.

Dr Ramit Debnath

Dr Ramit Debnath is a computational social scientist and a Gates Scholar based at the University of Cambridge. He is passionate about energy and climate justice. Ramit is the inaugural Cambridge Zero Fellow and a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech, and a sustainability fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Ramit works at the intersection of data science and public policy to support climate action, primarily focussing on developing novel approaches to natural language processing, machine learning, AI and qualitative analysis to enable a people-centric and just net-zero transition. He is passionate about energy and climate justice as well as countering misinformation.

Jonathan Bean

Jonathan Bean is a physicist, engineer and CEO of Materials Nexus, a deep-tech start-up that originated at Cambridge University and within the Carbon13 Venture Builder. His ground-breaking, AI-enabled Materials Discovery Platform transforms the way that new materials are designed using a rapid automated process and advanced quantum calculations that give high accuracy at larger scales. He work with partners to accelerate development of next-generation materials to reduce global CO2e emissions. Jonathon is a trustee at the charity Science Projects and has teaching roles at Trinity College Cambridge and London South Bank University.

Nomad Century: Gaia Vince in conversation with Elizabeth Cripps
2022-11-18 17:00 - 18:00
Author Gaia Vince draws attention to mass migration and climate change at a time when huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable.

‘Gaia Vince’s new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet, because it lays out, much more clearly than any existing scientific assessment, the world we are creating through global heating’ – Observer

While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable.

In Nomad Century, Gaia Vince provides an examination of this most pressing issue facing humanity. In conversation with Elizabeth Cripps, Vince discusses how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, many of which face demographic crises and labour shortages.

Speaker Biographies

Gaia Vince

Gaia Vince is a journalist, writer and broadcaster, and an honorary senior research fellow at UCL. She writes for publications including the Observer and Guardian, and presents programmes on BBC R4. She is the author of the ground-breaking work Adventures in The Anthropocene for which she spent two and half years travelling to over 50 countries to map the ways humans are changing the planet forever. She draws on this, along with a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, and her own first-hand experience of the state of the planet. Gaia shows how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, many of which face demographic crises and labour shortages.

Dr Elizabeth Cripps

Dr Elizabeth Cripps is a writer and philosopher. She is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Edinburgh and the author of What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care (Bloomsbury, 2022), as well as the forthcoming Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher’s Guide to Doing Right by your Kids – and Everyone Else (MIT Press). Elizabeth has written opinion pieces for the Guardian, the Herald and the Big Issue and appeared on podcasts and radio shows, including for BBC Radio, WBAI, and Newstalk. As a former journalist, she worked for the Financial Times Group.

Book details:

Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval

What My Body Can/t Remember
2022-11-16 18:00 - 19:30
Since 2014, Palestinian dancer and choreographer Farah Saleh has been creating an Archive of Gestures through the re-enactment, transformation, and analyses of bodily gestures and movements. In What My Body Can/t Remember, Saleh explores what her body can and can’t remember of her life in Ramallah in 2002 when, living under curfew, she returned to dancing after years of interruption. Working with filmmaker Owa Barua, Saleh recalls the daily gestures of her life exploring her memory of a period when her domestic space was her only site of physical freedom. First commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery and Dance International Glasgow in 2019, What My Body Can/t Remember interrogates the retrieval, integrity, and degradation of embodied memory.

This performance is supported by the Centre for Data, Culture & Society.

Performers

Farah Saleh

Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer and choreographer active in Palestine, Europe and the US. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. Since 2010 she has taken part in local and international projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/Christophersen (Norway) and Candoco Dance Company (UK). Saleh teaches dance, and coordinates and curates artistic projects with the Palestinian Circus School, Sareyyet Ramallah and the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival. In 2016 she co-founded Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Summer School. She was an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh 2017-2021.

Owa Barua

Owa Barua is an Edinburgh-based moving image artist, freelance videographer and editor, workshop facilitator and community worker. His work has been selected and awarded at several international film festivals, and also installed at the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Southbank Centre (London), and at the University of Bath Mediawall. As a freelancer filmmaker he has created documentary and promotional films for London arts organisations such as East London Dance, Stratford Circus Arts Centre, Move The World and Sadlers Wells. He has produced and directed community-based film projects for organizations such as Rathbone Society and Diverse Dance.

The event will be chaired by Lucy Weir.

EFI Student Photography Competition: The Future of Climate Justice
2022-11-14 15:00 - 16:00
Join us for a drink and delicious, celebratory treat as we reveal the winners of the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Student Photography Competition and view a selection of the submitted photographs.

Professor Liz Grant, Assistant Principal (Global Health) and Director of the Global Health Academy at the University of Edinburgh, will announce the winners and speak to the themes raised in the submissions.

This competition has asked University of Edinburgh Students to respond creatively to the theme of this year’s University of Edinburgh Futures Conversations – The Future of Climate Justice and the challenge: What does climate justice look like to you?

We hope this collection of images will stimulate further conversation and action following on from the Edinburgh Futures Conversations, and will chime with important work taking place at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27).

Image credit: Gintare Kulyte

Utopia Lab
2022-11-11 11:00 - 14:00
Utopia is a ‘no-space’ for contemplation, innovation and collaboration. The term utopia was coined from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The word comes from Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no-place”, and strictly describes any non-existent society ‘described in considerable detail’.

Our Utopia Labs are ‘no-spaces’, places where everyone is welcome to join us in dreaming futures that inspire our experience of the present. Our labs curate interactions between academics, artists, entrepreneurs, students and audiences in person and online globally. We are interested in that which is provocative and irreverent as well as that which is nurturing and joyful. Utopia questions are catalysts for inquiry, learning and creativity. With an emphasis on innovative and experimental ways of communicating, we will explore meditation, dialogue and co-creation with the help of a facilitator. Participants consist of University of Edinburgh staff and students, and non-University practitioners.

In this Utopia Lab session, invited speakers will present visions of their Utopia, which we will (individually or in groups, as preferred) respond to by creating our own artistic and creative mini-Utopias. We will consider what Utopia means and how it could be a useful crucible in which to explore positive change.

11am-12pm: Introductions and Presentations

12pm-1pm: Lunch and Dreaming/Making

1pm-2pm: Sharing

Lunch and materials for creating will be provided. The lab will also include meditation, poetry reading/listening and simple movement and breathing exercises. All body types and levels of experience welcome.

Speaker biographies

Gareth Williams

Composer and songwriter Gareth Williams lives in Edinburgh, where he makes work that ranges from opera, theatre and songwriting to chamber and orchestral music. He is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, where he lectures in composition. He seeks to find new participants and audiences for opera and music theatre with his work, and to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, exploring ideas of identity and vulnerability in his vocal writing. His music is often site-specific and responsive, with performances happening in lighthouses, whisky distilleries, nuclear bunkers, and libraries. He creates award winning work for companies such as Scottish Opera, Red Note Ensemble, National Theatre of Scotland, Ulster Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Tapestry Opera, Theatre Passe Muraille, Bridge Theatre, Hebrides Ensemble, Chamber Music Scotland, and Noise Opera.

Sufee Yama

Sufee Yama is a Creative Technologist specialized in immersive media storytelling. Sufee works across Interactive AR, Interactive VR film and animation, 360 video, Mixed Reality Performance and Mixed Reality video. Her personal R&D experiments are brought to use for brands’ commercials, documentaries, movies, events and exhibitions with clients like Meta, Snap Inc., The Guardian US, The Japan Foundation, Goethe-Institut, FABLAB , Thailand Government Agencies and were mentioned on platforms like The Museum of Other Realities, Snap AR, FritzAI and Lenslist. Being an active member in the creative VR/AR community, Sufee hosts workshops and activities for cultural organizations and Universities. Passionate about the future of storytelling and new media, Sufee thinks major parts of current Fine art industries will unavoidably needed to transform their work format to thrive. She founded Utopia Lab Studio(www.utopialab.co), an experimental creative AR/VR studio focusing on the future of storytelling based on the intersection of Fine Art, Design and Business in the hope that she can help bring real world Fine Art including performing art into AR/VR space.

Sargent, Lyman Tower (2005). Rüsen, Jörn; Fehr, Michael; Reiger, Thomas W. (eds.). The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A cross-national perspective. Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds (Report). New York: Berghahn Books. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-57181-440-1.

Half-Earth Socialism: Ambitious speculation on possible futures
2022-11-07 18:00 - 19:30
Join a lively discussion with authors of the thrilling and provocative book, Half-Earth Socialism, as well as the designers who created a video game based on the book. The event will feature discussions and Q&A with the authors and designers, as well as a chance to explore the game!

Half-Earth Socialism makes clear that while we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth, we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good. Over the next generation, humanity will confront a dystopian future of climate disaster and mass extinction. Yet the only ‘solutions’ on offer are toothless cap-and-trade programmes, catastrophic geoengineering schemes, and privatized conservation, which will do nothing to reverse the damage suffered by the biosphere. Indeed, these mainstream approaches assume that hyper-consumerism in the Global North can continue unabated. It can’t.

What we can do, environmental scholars Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue, is strive for a society able to ensure high living standards while stabilizing the environment. This means:

Rewilding half the earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity

A rapid transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption by the world’s wealthiest

Global veganism to cut down on energy and land use

Worldwide socialist planning to efficiently and equitably manage production

The involvement of everyone—even you!

The authors collaborated with designers from the Jain Family Institute and Trust to create a video game based on the book which can be viewed at play.half.earth.

Speaker Biographies

Troy Vettese

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute, where he is affiliated with the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. He studies the history of environmental economics, energy, and animal life under capitalism. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, New Left Review, The Guardian, n+1 and many more publications.

Francis Tseng

Francis Tseng is a software engineer and lead independent researcher at the Jain Family Institute. He primarily builds modeling tools, simulations, and procedural systems. In the past he taught at the New School, was co-publisher of The New Inquiry, and was a fellow at The New York Times.

Son La Pham

Son La Pham lives in Berlin and works as a graphic designer focusing on new forms for technology and the web. His digital work has been published in It’s Nice That, Hoverstates, Loadmore and Fonts In Use.

Chair

Heather Parry

Heather Parry is a fiction writer and editor originally from Rotherham, South Yorkshire. She is the co-founder and Editorial Director of Extra Teeth magazine, co-host of the Teenage Scream podcast and the Scottish Senior Policy & Liaison Manager for the Society of Authors, a trade union for writers. In 2021 she created the free-access Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide with artist Maria Stoian.

Book Details:

Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics

Soroche: On Heights and Climates
2022-11-04 18:00 - 19:30
Soroche is the word used in Colombia to describe altitude sickness. In this multidisciplinary piece, combining text, music and imagery, writer Jessica Gaitan Johannesson and musician Stephanie Lamprea explore personal and collective history in relation to the country they share a connection with – Colombia. They are joined by musician Alistair MacDonald as they, through words and sound, ask how colonial history underlines a crisis that is taking away our ability to breathe.

Speakers/Performers

Stephanie Lamprea

Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator, and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, she uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (Jason Eckardt). In 2022, Stephanie released a debut solo album, Quaking Aspen, on New Focus Recordings. A passionate educator and speaker, Stephanie has taught and performed in residency for universities across the United States and Europe including the University of California at Davis, Temple University, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson is a Swedish/Colombian writer and climate justice activist based in Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the multiplicity of identity and belonging. Her debut novel How We Are Translated (2021) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and her essay collection The Nerves and Their Endings: Essays on crisis and response is published in August 2022. She was Wasafiri Magazine’s Writer-in-Residence for 2021-22, delivering workshops on writing and climate justice. She works as Digital Campaigns Manager for Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh’s radical bookshop, highlighting the meeting point, and frictions, between reading, writing and change-making.

Alistair MacDonald

Alistair MacDonald is a composer, performer and sound artist. He has been designing his own computer-based sound processing instruments/environments for more than 20 years, to create uniquely rich, spatialised music and sound. Often collaborative his work encompasses composing, field recording, live electronics, interactivity and improvisation. He makes standalone electroacoustic works, music for instruments and voices, music and sound design for dance, film and installation. He is Professor and director of the Electroacoustic Studios at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

This event will be chaired by Andrés N. Ordorica.

The New Real Salon: Exploring the future of AI and the arts
2022-10-28 19:00 - 21:00
Part of EFI’s inaugural event season, The New Real Gala will present international projects and practitioners, alongside highlights of our most recent research partnerships with artists and festivals. Leading contemporary AI artists, designers and scientists will explore the most transformative technologies out there and announce a major new programme on Next Generation Intelligent Experiences.

The New Real programme is a unique hub for AI, creativity and futures research. We believe the arts can be at the forefront of new sustainable industries and economies, and devise imaginative ways to experiment with new experiences, practices, infrastructures and business models, and to empower people to be agents of positive change.

As part of the New Real Salon Opening Event, researcher and artist Gershon Dublon, will present and perform The Wandering Mind an AI-powered performance platform for shaping dreams with the sounds of our world. Guided by the performer to sample tiny fragments of sound from tens of thousands of field recordings found online, the system generates a winding sound journey for sleeping and meditating audiences. In their curated performances, group naps and guided mind-wanderings, dream guides convene collective actions of sleeping together.

Lex Fefegha will also present an interactive research project that visualises what Londoners might lose and what will remain in a future where heavy rainfall will lead to flooding on the Thames Path in 2040. Lex will be speaking about the importance of the Thames Path 2040 project, taking you through his process, the challenges faced and the current results of the work in progress.

Speaker Biographies

Speakers

Prof Drew Hemment

Prof Drew Hemment is The New Real’s project principal investigator. He is an artist, designer and academic researcher, Chancellors Fellow at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Edinburgh College of Art and Research Fellow at The Turing. Drew is an artist, designer and academic researcher, who over 25 years has been one of the key figures who has shaped the field of digital art and culture. He is Professor of Data Arts and Society, Chancellors Fellow and Director of Festival Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Edinburgh College of Art within University of Edinburgh.

Gershon Dublon

Gershon Dublon is a researcher and artist whose work locates sites and means of connection between human perception and machine sensing. By day, Dublon is a Senior Researcher at Sonos, focusing on applications of multimodal sensing to immersive audio. Dublon has published articles in Presence (MIT Press), Scientiﬁc American, IEEE Sensors, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Body Sensor Networks, ICML, and others, and recently contributed to Swamps and the New Imagination. Their projects have been shown at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Mexico’s National Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, Future Everything, and Sundance Film Festival.

Lex Fefegha

Lex Fefegha spends most of his time leading a small team of designers and coders at COMUZI, a London based design studio creating future-positive products, services and experiences for governments, organisations and charities. In his spare time, Lex has been exploring AI & creativity projects, working with Google AI & Google & Arts Culture Lab to create The Hip Hop Poetry Bot, an AI research project, exploring speech generation trained on rap and hip hop lyrics by black artists.

Contributing Speakers

Dr Matjaz Vidmar

Dr Matjaz Vidmar is The New Real’s co investigator, an interdisciplinary researcher, lecturer and strategist at the University of Edinburgh. He is an (Astro)Physicist by training, now examining innovation processes and (inter-)organisational learning and change, as well as other social dimensions of emerging technologies.

Chris Speed

Chris Speed is EFI’s Director of Innovation and Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Chris’s research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. He has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences.

Event chair

Caroline Sinders

Caroline Sinders is a machine-learning-design researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of technology’s impact in society, interface design, artificial intelligence, abuse, and politics in digital, conversational spaces.

Scottish BPOC Writers Network: First Breath - Artist reflections
2022-10-21 18:00 - 19:30
Join an evening of celebration as the Scottish Black and PoC (BPOC) Writers Network invites you to admire three brilliant Black artists and writers to read and present some of their work and practice. Expect poetry as well as more visual art forms, exuberant talent, and a candid discussion amongst panellists. The creatives have been invited to reflect and share ideas on the theme – First Breath – and perhaps to articulate how breathing and the breath transpires in their work. What does it mean to consider and materialise this instinctive but vital act?

Speaker biographies

Brenda Vengesa

Accordion content.

Brenda Vengesa has worked in the Accounting and Finance sector for over 10 years. She is currently working full time whilst working on her first novel and poetry collection. Brenda has also worked on onstage where she has performed in amateur musical theatre with the MAMA (Musselburgh Amateur Musical Association). She used the lockdown period from the pandemic to reignite her passion for the arts and sharpen her skills.

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams is an author, poet and the founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association. She curates education programmes, arts events and walking tours to promote the shared heritage between Scotland and the Caribbean and the possiblities of decolonising and anti-racist practice. She is an Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and works as a consultant to heritage organisations across Scotland.

Thulani Rachia

Thulani Rachia is an artist and educator based in Glasgow. His work is informed by architecture, design, performing and visual arts and his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working through the legacies of the Apartheid regime and Dutch and British colonial rule, his work investigates how the built environment carries this history and shapes contemporary social relationships. Siwaguba kanjani amaphupho ethu agqitjwe kulezindonga?: how do we excavate the dreams laid to rest in these walls? acts as a focal point to explore ideas around colonial legacies, reparations and healing within the built environment. Thulani is currently a resident on the Talbot Rice Residency Programme 2022/23.

About SBWN

Scottish BPOC Writers Network (SBWN) is an advocacy and professional development community organisation for and by Scottish and Scotland-based writers and literary professionals who identify as BPOC (Black people, People of Colour). Its aim is to uplift, validate and provide safer spaces for marginalised voices, nurturing and promoting the current and next generation of Black and POC writers based in Scotland.

Digesting the Futures Conversations
2022-10-20 18:00 - 19:00
Our objective is to reflect on the Edinburgh Futures Conversations and create an open platform to share knowledge through conversation.

Conceived by Lois Weaver, a Long Table is a dinner table setting where, instead of food, conversation is on the menu. Hosted in a physical space, it is a non-hierarchical process of participation where people gather to discuss topics of mutual interest. A curated group of guests will set the table with food for thought. Following this, anyone can join the table to steer the conversation, mediate moments of tension, and amplify voices not always heard.

There is no intent to come to a conclusion.

Edinburgh Futures Conversations – AMUK
2022-10-14 18:00 - 19:30
While everyone is witnessing the impacts of climate change, in many regions of the world people are losing their homes, livelihoods, culture and lives. It is not enough to recognise that climate change is accelerating. Climate change is one of the greatest drivers of injustice the world has ever seen.

In AMUK, Indonesian writer and artist Khairani Barokka performs a new, archipelago-futurist piece on environmental and climate crises as the result of centuries of colonial extractivism. Through the colonial histories leading to the mistranslation of the Malay/Indonesian word ‘amuk’ into ‘amuck’, and the phrase ‘running amuck’, these words are imagined as characters in literal dialogue with and against each other.

This specially commissioned poetry performance from Khairani Barokka builds on questions of climate policy and finance to tell the story – a story, our story, the story of our earth. Through her work and in conversation with Esa Aldegheri, Khairani Barokka will shift our understanding of the climate crisis from an external clash of nature and humanity to an internal struggle of behaviours, histories, cultures and ethics.

Performer/Speaker Biographies

Performer

Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka  is Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and a writer and artist from Jakarta, whose work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis and environmental justice. Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation, and Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK). Okka’s work includes being author-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), author of Rope (Nine Arches), and co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). Her most recent installation was at Museum Nasional for Jakarta Biennale, and her latest book is Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

Chair

Esa Aldegheri

Dr. Esa Aldegheri is a multilingual writer, educator and scholar. She studied Arabic at the University of Edinburgh and now works at the University of Glasgow supporting the integration of people seeking sanctuary in Scotland. Her non-fiction debut Free to Go (John Murray Press, 2022) moves beyond the parameters of a simple travel narrative to explore different aspects of freedom and borders, both geopolitical and personal. It is a story about travelling from Orkney to New Zealand on a motorbike shared with a willing companion, interwoven with a parallel tale of diminished liberties linked to the author’s experiences of motherhood, Brexit and pandemic restrictions. Esa’s non-fiction writing has also been published by Granta, Gutter Press, the Dangerous Women Project and others. Her poetry has been read on Radio 4 and Radio Scotland and features in several anthologies. She is from Scotland and Italy, and lives with her family by the sea near Edinburgh.
