This series of linked digital engagements from Penn’s Environmental Humanities is designed to showcase publicly engaged environmental research projects that marry environmental art and science. The platform is a culmination of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities’ (PPEH) multi-year explorations of how data, paired with story, can spur action on climate. The platform’s homepage at climatesensing.org will officially launch on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day: April 22, 2020.

Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling: May 7-9

This live stream event is free and open to the public; register in advance on the homepage. In addition to a pre-recorded keynote address and live videoconferenced question-and-
answer session with novelist Amitav Ghosh, this stream will include pre-recorded presentations by such scholars as Laura Barbas-Rhoden (Wofford College), Dominic Boyer (Rice University), Allison Carruth (UCLA), Erin James (University of Idaho), Dolly Jørgensen (University of Stavanger), Patricia Kim (NYU), Jen Ladino (University of Idaho), Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon), Sheri Parks (MICA), and Bethany Wiggin (Penn); a live conversation between Amitav Ghosh and Columbia University atmospheric scientist Adam Sobel, moderated by PPEH Topic Director and Associate Professor of Anthropology Nikhil Anand; and a live limited enrollment artist workshop with PPEH Artist-in-Residence Amy Balkin.

These presentations will feature work designed to promote public engagement and generate conversations about environmental and data literacy and justice: art walks; workshops for speculative futures; dance; tours; and public writing, oral history and community science projects. Registered participants will also be invited to a remote “happy hour” and welcome session on the evening of May 7.

Making Sense

This online art exhibition features the work of PPEH Artist-in-Residence Amy Balkin, participating artists Roderick Coover, Jessica Creane, Adrienne Mackey and Sarah Cameron Sunde, as well as creative interventions from the public research projects featured in the scholarly presentations.

My Climate Story

My Climate Story is a series of digital enhancements that features storytelling prompts and tools developed by PPEH’s team of Climate Storytelling public research interns and inspired by past PPEH Writer-in-Residence Eric Holthaus’s insight that “If words make worlds, then we urgently need to tell a new story about the climate crisis.” A culminating engagement in the University of Pennsylvania’s “Year of Data,” the initiative invites additions of lived personal experiences of climate change as vital, embodied climate data to the project’s public data storybank.

covid X climate

A newer public engagement collaboration born of our present global health crisis, covid X climate invites thinkers—scholars, artists, activists, citizens of the world—to share their lived experience and expertise to collectively draw connections between COVID-19 and the set of convergent crises usually lumped under the heading of “climate change.”