What is the responsibility, or the task of the arts as we face environmental crisis?
Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities. Ecologies in Practice identifies the arts as an important mode of inquiry for reimagining, and for public engagement and understanding of pressing environmental and social concerns, while acknowledging the ways in which it contributes important work to the growing interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.
Bringing together artistic perspectives from a range of lenses and voices, including artists, writers, scholars, activists, curators, theorists, and makers, Ecologies in Practice offers important tools for artists, scholars, students, and research-creators invested in arts and the environment. Contributors present artistic methods as alternative sites of understanding that contribute significant and affective work to environmental scholarship, while thinking outside of the disciplinary borders and confines of the artworld. Ecologies in Practice aims to initiate vital conversations among practitioners, and together with readers, consider what environmentally engaged arts lend differently to these conversations.

Elysia French is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University. French is trained as an art historian and studies contemporary art and the environment, with an interest in the visual culture of oil, climate change, and multispecies relationships.

Elysia French's profile page

Amanda White (she/her) is a white settler artist/scholar currently living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Art at Western University. Her current work and research is focused on plants, food, and environmental justice. amandawhite.com

Amanda White's profile page

Christina Battle's profile page

Leah Decter's profile page

Natalie Doonan's profile page

Camille Georgeson-Usher's profile page

Lisa Hirmer's profile page

Originally from Halifax, David Huebert has lived in Revelstoke, Fernie, Victoria, and Toronto. Currently a PhD student at Western University, his poetry has appeared in journals such as Event, Vallum, The Antigonish Review, and The Literary Review of Canada. His fiction has appeared in Grain, Existere, and The Dalhousie Review. we are no longer the smart kids in class is his first poetry collection.

David Huebert's profile page

Tom Cull has published a collection of poetry, Bad Animals (2018), and two chapbooks, What the Badger Said (2013) and Keep Your Distance (2021, co-written with Kerry Manders). His work has appeared in This Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Rusty Toque, Long Con Magazine, The Windsor Review, The New Quarterly, and The Goose. Cull was poet laureate for the city of London, ON, from 2016–18. He is the director of Antler River Rally (ARR), a grass roots environmental group he co-founded in 2012 with his partner Miriam Love. He works at the Upper Thames Conservation Authority and teaches creative writing at Western University. Born and raised in Huron County, ON, he currently resides in London on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapéewak and Chonnonton Nations.

 

Tom Cull's profile page

During the five years that Emily McGiffin lived in northwest BC, she became proficient in the fine art of firewood splitting. She holds an MSc from the University of London and has worked and studied in Italy, Sierra Leone and the Philippines. Her poetry, essays, reviews and journalistic articles, widely published in magazines across Canada, have most recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2. Between Dusk and Night, her first poetry collection, was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Toronto where she is a PhD student at York University.

Emily McGiffin's profile page

Maria Michails' profile page

Emma Morgan-Thorp's profile page

Dana Prieto's profile page

Genevieve Robertson's profile page

Andreas Rutkauskas' profile page

Mary Ann Steggles' profile page

Ellyn Walker is a curator and writer based in Toronto. Her work focuses on cross-cultural and artistic production as a type of decolonizing practice. Her research asks questions of inclusion and coalition in relation to the nation-state. Her projects have been presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Videofag. Her writing has been published in C Magazine, the Journal for Curatorial Studies, PUBLIC, Magenta magazine, Studio, and Sketch. Ellyn holds an MFA at OCAD University in the Criticism & Curatorial Practice program.

Ellyn Walker's profile page

Ecologies in Practice offers an adventurous foray into the current state of environmentally engaged arts in Canada. Its wide-ranging explorations of media and artistic practices will appeal to practitioners working in studio, in situ, and gallery settings, as well as those who research and teach in environmental humanities. The contributors add new layers to a rich existing lineage of arts-based environmental inquiry in Canada and engage with questions fundamental to understanding ourselves as stubbornly creative, cultural, and ecological beings. We need the contributions of artists of all stripes to help us imagine anew in the uneasy times to come, and this volume helps guide the way.”

Jenny Kerber, Wilfrid Laurier University, author of Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally