Liny Lamberink writes about Watch Your Head  on CBC London.

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Today Watch Your Head Publisher Kathryn Mockler sat down with Chris dela Torre on Afternoon Drive to chat about Watch Your Head!

Listen here.

Western News profiles WATCH YOUR HEAD!

When the planet is on fire, it takes words – and then more than words – to inspire and mobilize Canadians to do battle for the planet.

That’s the idea behind a new online poetry and prose anthology, dedicated to the climate crisis and edited by English professor Kathryn Mockler. Coach House Books plans to publish the works, collectively called Watch Your Head, in mid-2020 with all proceeds donated to climate justice and Indigenous groups.

The works are a vehicle that will drive other planned events, such as national panels, town halls and readings across the country, Mockler said. “The purpose of the journal is not so much a literary venture. It’s a call to action.”
 
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​Watch Your Head Editor Madhur Anand is participating in this symposium.

​Tickets available here.

Date/Time
Mon, 25 November 2019 
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM EST
 
Location
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON M5S 3K7


About this Event
Climate change is often framed as an exclusively scientific issue: a matter of rising carbon dioxide levels, decreasing arctic ice and species extinction. But humanists and artists also grapple with this environmental crisis, and today deeply engaged, thought-provoking and artistically savvy responses to climate change are showing up in galleries, concert halls and theaters as well as in universities across the globe. Indeed, much recent art deftly incorporates scientific research and methodologies, such as Philippe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed, Mel Chin’s fine art app ‘Unmoored,’ and Daniel Crawford’s string quartet piece "Planetary Bands, Warming World". Too often climate science and environmental humanities travel two parallel tracks, functioning as concurrent but not collaborative projects. Conjoining the two is a force amplifier.
 
This one-day symposium will bring together climate scientists, humanists and artists to bridge this disciplinary gap. In partnership with co-sponsors the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) and the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS), the event will welcome guest scholars and artists who are committed to – and practiced in – the current paradigm shift to less siloed climate change thinking.
 
The symposium will feature artists and humanities scholars in dialogue with scientists. Speakers include:

• Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech, is engaged in a conceptually similar project, as she strives to develop better ways of translating climate projections and bridge the gap between scientists and stakeholders.
• Diane Burko - whose visual art incorporates scientific data - will discuss her use of coral reef bleaching metrics in aestheticized images of underwater beauty.
• Cate Sandilands, of York University’s Environmental Studies program – proposes new solutions to a persistent problem: how to effectively communicate environmental crisis to a wide audience. Sandilands believes narrative is key: “Public climate change stories shape how we understand the present, imagine the future, and conceive of possible interventions between the now and the then.”
• Gavin Schmidt, of the NASA Institute for Space Studies, pairs his work on climate change drivers with scientific context for pop culture discussions of environmental crisis.
• Madhur Anand, a poet and a professor of ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Guelph, where she mixes poetic and scientific approaches to articulating current and impending crises.
• Paul Kushner, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto, studies the links between ice, snow, and changing atmospheric circulation, while advocating for scientists to speak up about the risks and realities of climate change.
• Bhavani Raman, a JHI fellow and historian at the University of Toronto, who studies the history of colonialism and environmental law, with a particular focus on South Asia, such as in her exploration of the geographies of coastal flooding in Chennai.

 
‘The Science and Art of Climate Change’ will extend the reach of ‘Strange Weather’ beyond 2019-2020. This symposium will be a key step in the School of the Environment’s exploration – evident in April 2019’s cross-disciplinary colloquium ‘Imagining a Post-Carbon World’ – of better integrating humanists into the School. To this end, the event will explore both theories of cross-disciplinary work and methodological questions of how exactly to enact such a timely and productive practice.
 
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Expectations of Conduct and Rules for Seminars and Events.

“The planet’s on fucking fire.” That’s how popular scientist Bill Nye described the Earth’s existential dilemma on a recent episode of the HBO satirical news show This Week Tonight with John Oliver. Where the current, ongoing, global climate emergency is concerned, Nye is certainly not the only figure to express alarm. In a furious speech to the United Nations in New York City on September 23, sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg denounced world leaders who are sitting on their hands as rising temperatures threaten the future of human life on the planet: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Notwithstanding the increasing sense of urgency on the part of an ever larger segment of the worldwide population, entrenched special interests wielding power and – not incidentally – enormous tranches of wealth continue to ensure that the political will to enact legislation capable of curtailing the climate catastrophe remains untapped.

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