While the goals of sustainability are often predicated around environmental issues (including, but not limited to global warming, climate change, resource extraction), it is imperative to understand the deeper implications that inflect upon diverse populations including Indigenous, refugee, and other racialized communities. Melting polar caps, deforestation in the Amazon, massive hydroelectric dam constructions in densely populated regions, ongoing displacement of Indigenous communities, and rampant inequities highlighted by the current pandemic, all of these are indelibly pertinent in the contexts of diversity and sustainability. The intention of this gathering is to provide opportunities for AICAD members to plumb the depths of these issues in order to delineate how art and design can assist and provide guidance as we imagine a more productively equitable future.
Must Give Us Pause: Diversity + Sustainability, seeks to reflect upon and investigate our collective values, pedagogies, research, challenges, and potential visions -- as artists, designers, curators, and critical thinkers-- that will provide guidance as we forge a path forward that is inclusive and attentive to some of the most pressing issues of our day. As Sharon Mattern recently wrote, the pandemic has resulted in “The Great Pause,” one which saw some retreating to the safety of the domestic sphere while others were forced into harm’s way. However, “It is all too easy to overlook the activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security.”
OCAD U (Ontario College of Art and Design University) seeks proposals from artists, designers, and related cultural workers that will explore the symposium’s theme of reflective contemplation in the face of dire need. The intent is to foreground issues of sustainability as they inflict on Indigenous and other racialized and disproportionately affected communities, and how art and design modalities might provide opportunities and pathways toward an imagined world which privileges such rebalancing. We seek stories and storytelling from students and faculty working across disciplines in the AICAD community, who are exploring strategies for coping and thriving, rethinking power structures within and outside our institutions and within the community and grassroots organizations, modeling pedagogies that respond efficaciously to current global conditions, creative and critical approaches to socio-political change, valuing and enabling downtime in response to make-work imperatives, the transformation of our campuses through environmental and aesthetic means, and any other insights from our AICAD partners that give us pause and open us up to progressive possibilities.