GCSJ seminar series: What is the potential of creative practice for building community resilience in flood-prone coastal communities in the UK?

Speakers:

George Revill (OU)

Liza Griffin (UCL)

Abstract:

This paper critically explores the potential of creative practices for achieving community resilience in relation to efforts to address flooding in coastal regions of the UK. Specifically, we ask how socially engaged artistic practices can support and facilitate community engagement, enhance social learning, and build social capital. The paper specifically asks which creative interactions, processes and practices can best help re/make and perform community in the UK today in the context of the challenges presented by social and environmental concerns including austerity, inequality and climate change, but with a focus on coastal flooding policy. 

We argue here that imaginative ways of thinking, communicating, and working are necessarily required to better engage publics communities and manage the entangled and far-reaching environmental problems that we face today. The impacts of intractable challenges like coastal flooding present a conundrum that requires a novel approach their resolution. We are starting from the position that creative practices could offer us a fresh and powerful way to confront these impasses. However, the relations, dispositions and political dynamics involved in socially engaged creative processes remain to be more fully explored.

The seminar series is organised by The Open University's Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice (GCSJ). Established in October 2021, the Centre in the School of Social Sciences and Global Studies provides critical, interdisciplinary insight, and innovative, social justice driven solutions to challenges facing contemporary global societies. The Centre’s ambition is to understand the historical and structural underpinnings of contemporary societies; the systems of oppressions and inequalities they reproduce; and the resistances and struggles they generate.