ClimateUEA is delighted to introduce our new PhD cohort, as part of the programme 'Critical Decade for Climate Change Leverhulme Doctoral Scholars', directed by Professor Corinne Le Quéré and Deputy Director Dr Mark Tebboth.
Other words, other worlds: narratives of a climate-changing planet
Supervisors: Jean McNeil (LDC) / Armijos Burneo (DEV)
I'm a writer, facilitator and artist working at the intersection of ecological justice, culture and systemic change. Over the past 15 years, I've been a social movement organiser, systems change facilitator, policy analyst, community learning partner and multi-disciplinary artist, mostly in music and spoken and written word.
With experience across Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, I've worked on climate, ecological, economic, gender & racial justice issues, agroecology and regenerative food systems, conflict transformation, power, privilege & intersectionality, weaving networks & decolonising practice. This has involved multi-country re-search (incl. action-research) projects, movement-building & learning processes - from strategy days to community organising caravans, creative festivals to embodiment coaching - and building context-appropriate social & physical infrastructure with the communities that are the ones who are going to use it.
In my current work, I support people to immerse into the cultural somatic worlds that shape the patterns we carry and those it is possible to change. By reshaping stuck, repeating patterns, a lot can start to shift. I translate musical practice into the way I facilitate, which I like to think of as 'jamming' with power in many forms - embodied, psycho-emotional, cultural, structural - aiming to resource trustful collaboration for shaping change towards equitable life worlds. My background includes history & philosophy of science (including indigenous approaches), political economy and ecology (including bioregional & biocultural approaches), anthropology of violence, emergent strategy, and healing approaches from multiple lineages.
What are you most excited about in joining the Critical Decade PhD programme?
The 'Other words, Other worlds: diversifying narratives on a climate-changing planet' project feels like it could be a great creative incubator for my work and interests. Weaving the stories of systemically invisibilised (and therefore often vulnerabilised) human and more-than-human beings in ways that relate to climate justice; facilitating diverse people to learn and evaluate complex information through different learning channels, from the cognitive to the emotional. I'm excited to be engaging deeply with people with expertise in this area, both of worlds I know, and those I'm yet to discover. I'm also excited to develop my creative writing practice, with the support of brilliant supervisors and to learn from other UEA researchers on topics and fields related to my PhD.