Join us for an interactive workshop exploring how climate emotions show up in our bodies and engaging with different ways to use our five senses to connect with our immediate landscapes. We'll start with a body mapping exercise, embark on a shared sound and sense walk, and then have the chance to do some writing and reflect together about our experiences and stories.
About Our Workshop Leaders:
Raksha Vasudevan is a current Dr. Bruce S. Goldberg Postdoctoral Fellow in Youth Wellbeing at the Center for Sustainable Futures, Teachers College, Columbia University. Her work focuses on the impacts of planning and education institutions on young people’s well-being and their possibilities for the future. She is interested in how young people understand and negotiate socio-environmental uncertainties in their daily lives.
She is inspired by intersectional and decolonial feminist scholars to envision alternative, more ethical modes of critical urban research and practice. Given that young people have intimate and embodied expertise about the neighborhood they live in, she combines feminist ethnography with mapping, oral histories, and arts-based methods to co-produce knowledge with young people and their families.
Ben Mylius is an Australian teacher, lawyer, and writer. His Ph.D. thesis, On Human Separatism, critiques techno-utopian approaches to climate change (according to which Humanity can use technology to "separate" from nature), and explores alternatives as they emerge out of non-European cultures' narratives and stories about human nature. He has an LL.M. from Yale University and an M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia, and is a recipient of several of Australia’s most prestigious postgraduate scholarships, including a General Sir John Monash Award (Australia’s homegrown equivalent of Rhodes Scholarships).
Mr. Mylius is the founding convenor of Columbia’s Climate Imaginations Network: a group of creative folks who support and inspire one another to imagine just, resilient, and dynamic climate futures. He is also an enthusiastic ceramicist and novelist. At Columbia, he has taught courses in environmental political theory (EPT), general political theory, international law, and human rights, and was a finalist for Columbia’s Presidential Awards for Teaching for his EPT course, Humans, Nature and the Future.
Mr. Mylius's work revolves around four key questions:
1. How can we use stories, and other ways of sharing ideas, to imagine more just and ecological futures?
2. How can we relate to one another in ways that nurture belonging and community?
3. How can we learn and teach in ways that nurture and regenerate?
4. How can we who grew up in historically dominant and dominating cultures follow others in ways that honor their resilience, creativity, and integrity?
