Conference Agenda

This innovative session is at once a participatory method and a form of embodied democratic practice that connects everyday lifeworlds and physical surroundings to larger questions of how to cope with planetary transformations. Our question is: How can we walk with others as climate change radically transforms life-as-we-know-it? The emotional and physical loss suffered due to climate change can be overwhelming and debilitating. Shared Walks/Climate Change Edition explores how embodied experience can turn into reflection and awareness, and how this can, in turn, enable agency and action.

Shared Walks is an initiative that opens a playful space for the exploration of the environment and others by walking. Based on this artistic/urban/participatory methodology, Shared Walks/Climate Change Edition was developed as an experimental contribution to respond to the climate emergency, trace its influences on the human psyche and the more-than-human environment. Participants walk in pairs, collect and share observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings, memories, stories, associations, mapping their surroundings. Participants are provided with a set of cards with different walking prompts, proposing minor changes in how they normally walk. This paves the way for an appropriation of places in which we live/work/walk, connect with others and trigger self-awareness on the traces of climate emergency, the emotions emerging from our experiences of it (e.g. anger, resolve, anxiety, grief), potential actions (ranging from collecting and maintaining memories to solidarity and passionate political action). By walking in pairs around Nijmegen, in accordance with the challenges and questions proposed by the cards, participants will investigate the emotional and physical traces of climate change, and explore the ways in which we can understand and act on it in a reflection session.

11.00am – 11.15am : Introduction | Conference Registration/Information Desk (Grotius Building, main entrance)
11.15am to 12.15pm – Walk
12.15pm to 12.30pm – Break | Room GR 1.143 (Grotius Building)
12.30pm to 2.00pm – Reflection Session | Room GR 1.143 (Grotius Building)