Hosted by the Harvard GSD, this conference invites designers of an inclusive world to view climate in its power to affect human health, mental well-being, socio-political conditions, and cultures of ecology through subjective, embodied ways of knowing.
Titled “Embodied Climates,” the conference invites designers of an inclusive world to view climate in its power to affect human health, mental well-being, socio-political conditions, and cultures of ecology through subjective, embodied ways of knowing. The symposium will situate architecture at the core of influencing necessary change by acknowledging the built environment’s agency in the way that humans embody, respond, and react to changing climatic conditions. The conference will look at climate change not in terms of abstract data tables and figures but rather through more immediate and embodied ways of knowing. Whether that be addressing the reconstruction of local ecologies due to resource-exhausting labor practices of the past, or looking at the ways architecture acts as a prosthetic for human comfort in supposedly hostile climates, questions that the symposium hopes to answer are:
How does embodiment affect our understanding of the climate crisis and the way this crisis is narrativized? How might we understand the imperatives of climate stewardship and sustainability through means other than scientific analyses, data speculation, and financial loss? How might differing definitions of “embodiment” and “climate” press upon, compliment, or denaturalize one another? What are the factors and externalities that make the very notion of climate subjective through embodiment? How might ongoing discourses around resilience and climate change shape understandings of racial, sexual, gender, class, and other socio-political norms?
The conference entangles three thematics — Tectonics, Politics, and Health — and will culminate in a keynote speaker session.
Visit the event page for more information.
Contact: Melissa Hulett, melissa_hulett@gsd.harvard.edu
LOCATION:Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 42 Quincy St., Cambridge STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230915T140000Z DTEND:20230915T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR