The 2021 Iain McCalman Lecture
The Iain McCalman Lecture, created by聽Michelle St Anne, celebrates SEI co-founder and former co-director聽Iain McCalman鈥檚 dedication to fostering and pioneering multidisciplinary environmental research. The lectures aim to highlight the work of early to mid-career researchers working across disciplinary boundaries to impact both scholarship and public discourse.
This year, Dr Dalia Nassar will present the lecture entitled,聽Shallow and Deep Collaboration: Art, Ecology and Alexander von Humboldt.
The lecture will open with a concert by musicians Jim Denley, Romy Caen and Jacques Emery, commencing at 5.30 pm.
This event was presented online and at the University of Sydney on Wednesday 3 February.
Abstract
More and more people hold the view that the arts and the sciences need to collaborate in order to address the environmental crisis. But how can this be done? What should this collaboration look like? And what should its aims be?
One popular answer goes as follows: the sciences should hand over their data to the arts, so that the arts can communicate this data in an accessible and engaging way to the wider public. On this model, the arts are the 鈥渃ommunicators鈥� and 鈥減ublicizers鈥� of the sciences. Precisely because the arts attend to our emotional side, they possess a power, which graphs and numbers do not. And it is this power that needs to be put to use and harnessed.
Following Arne N忙ss鈥檚 distinction between shallow and deep ecology, Dr Nassar calls this 鈥渟hallow collaboration.鈥� In contrast to it, Nassar will argue for a form of 鈥渄eep collaboration,鈥� one that recognises not only the power of art to touch us emotionally, but also its ability to transform the ways we see and think about the world鈥撯�搃n other words, its ability to enhance our cognitive capacities.
To make her argument, Nassar will offer the historical example of the emergence of ecology in the work of Alexander von Humboldt. Drawing on Humboldt鈥檚 own use of art and aesthetics, she will demonstrate how art played a crucial role in the development of ecology, thereby showing that art can play a foundational role in scientific inquiry, and in our understanding of nature more generally.
Nassar will conclude by arguing that art not only can, but also that it should play this foundational role. While this form of deep collaboration should occur at all times, it is particularly important in a time of environmental crisis, which is not only a bio-physical crisis, but also, and more fundamentally, a cultural crisis.
Past lectures
2019: Dr Frances Flanagan,聽Climate Change and the New Work Order
Watch the video
Image header:聽Nathan Queloz on Unsplash.