This is a live document, to be shaped and co-created with participants and collaborators.
Core Aims
- To generate curiosity and facilitate community story-telling.
- To co-create a process of place-making through stories.
- To challenge inequalities in process as well as output.
- To share, not extract.
- To (co-)create playful, accessible and informative outputs.
- To be compassionate, community-focused and real throughout.
- To value participants as creative collaborators.
- To reach new audiences, and create a subtle shift in openness to questions of environmentalism.
Our position on ecological citizenship / inclusion and environmental justice
- Other bodies and beings are as valuable as human beings – we are interconnected and equal.
- Social, racial, class and environmental justice are intertwined and equal, yet there are inequalities in terms of the possibilities of engagement with being ‘in movement.’
- Different communities have different, often sacred and complicated relationships with water.
- Water is a source, and we are water – it affects us all and connects us all.
- We aim to make the unseen seen, and begin from a focus on the most marginalised, who are often the most impacted by environmental issues. Water exposes the margins, lays bare the most marginalised.
- We remain humble and in awe of nature.
- We appreciate and acknowledge the long view of any movement. We acknowledge that we are embedded in a longer time scale and context.
- Even though we know our position on ecological citizenship will inform our decisions, we think the work will have the strongest impact if it questions rather than dictates.
- We want to consider how we can take local action towards environmental justice / climate justice.
We will be careful in our presentation of microbes and disgust
We will seek to avoid damaging and reductive stereotypes of microbes and non-human life, in process and in the performances and outputs. Our depictions of microbes will be playful but respectful, and set the public health consequences of microbial contagion in a wider social and environmental context.
We will be careful when facilitating and presenting stories about disgust, with an acknowledgment that disgust is often associated with marginalised communities, through the lenses of race, queerness, nationality, class and caste.
We will use drag as a novel method of science communication, which enables the inclusion and representation of social and cultural perspectives.