Lifeworlds Research Cluster
Lifeworlds explores how art and design research engages with climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and degrading life quality within incommensurate scales and times of change. The ubiquitous nature of present ecological and political conditions requires new ways of bridging planetary processes and the intimate effects these changes have upon daily life. Research carried out within the cluster investigates how creative practice can imagine and enact more environmentally just livable worlds, facilitated by a deeper understanding of the visual, conceptual and material practices that shape human engagements with the ecosystems of which they are a part.
It comprises members working with diverse forms of practice-based and written research, exploring modes of assemblage, iteration and speculation that can generate unexpected, disobedient, joyful and liberating ways to conceive of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and their alternatives. Much Lifeworlds research is necessarily and exuberantly inter-disciplinary, with ongoing collaborations, events and partnerships reaching across the arts, humanities, social and environmental sciences to engage with fields and subjects including science and technology, phenology, multi-species filmmaking, infrastructure, environmental futures, and energy. The differing insights of these knowledges are brought together around common problems, offering possibilities for cross-fertilisation and new modes of working across the university and beyond.
Lifeworlds has hosted projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Chanse, St Andrews Interdisciplinary Research Fund, and UKRI. It programmes events, organises a monthly reading group and supports PhD researchers. Recent events include the 2024 series ‘Patching the World: On Cultures of Techno-solutionism in Art, Politics and Environmental justice’ and a three part event series on ‘Grid Imaginaries in Art and Culture,’ which explored the principal figure of electricity infrastructure – the grid – and its various manifestations in art and culture.
If you would like to find out more about our events or explore the possibility of working with us please get in touch with one of our cluster directors or follow announcements on our Instagram page @lifeworldsresearch.