CCRI’s Dan Keech and Mike Ricketts, Associate Head of Department of Art, at the University of the West of England, have been invited to contribute to the workshop on “Transdisciplinary research on sustainability transition, climate adaptation and risk reduction” at Karlstad University, Sweden on 3rd March.
For the past two years, Dan and Mike have teamed up to examine the transgression of physical and social boundaries during the severe floods experienced on the Somerset Levels and Moors in the consecutive winters of 2013 and 2014. Policy and land management responses to those floods included calls for better dredging of the ditches and improved meteorological forecasting, more tree planting, and even the abandonment of some settlements. Mike’s work as an artist, linked to Dan’s interest in local distinctiveness, has sought out unexpected outcomes of flooding in one village, Muchelney, to explore how flood experiences were represented, recounted and broadcast, to provide a hyperlocal insight into disrupted routines and reconfigured social relationships.
Following a presentation of their work at last year’s Nordic Geographers’ Meeting in Trondheim, Norway, the pair were invited to the workshop hosted by Professor Magareta Dalhström, Director of the Centre for Research on Region Building (CRS) at Karlstad University, Sweden. The workshop will share research in relation to sustainability transition and/or climate adaptation and risk reduction, and how this is carried out in a collaborative manner, for example in relation to research and ‘practice’, and collaboration between different partners in society.
Dan will also provide an account of attempts to develop networked and experimental governance of rural-urban relationships in Gloucestershire, through the European Commission project ROBUST (www.rural-urban.eu) in which CCRI and Gloucestershire County Council are partners. Sustainable food, ecosystems services and circular business models provide focal points in ROBUST.
Dan and Mike will join regional and environmental geographers, risk management modellers (who will demonstrate interactive flood modelling tools), IT and communication specialists, policy and governance experts and educationalists from Karlstad and Linköping Universities.
For more information contact Dan on dkeech@glos.ac.uk or Mike on mike.ricketts@uwe.ac.uk
