Community Climate Resilience Through Folk Pageantry

Community Climate Resilience through Folk Pageantry is a creative, imaginative and interdisciplinary practice-as-research project using community knowledge to deliver a Manchester-focused case study that responds directly to Manchester’s climate action policies and community contexts. The project will draw on geography, mapping, performance, music, socially-engaged arts practices, as well as intangible and material heritages.

Research questions

1. How can socially-engaged arts and community-based performance methods identify barriers and solutions to initiating climate mitigation and adaptation strategies?
2. How can creative methods offer improved and new processes, tools and skills by which community climate resilience and adaptation targets can be more effectively attained?
3. What is the transferability of creative techniques, processes and spaces for holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation locally and nationally?
4. How can creative practices be embedded within local policy consultation processes toward inclusive engagement on climate action?
5. How can research learn about modes of resilience from residents in areas of high deprivation?
6. What new “artivism” forms, spaces and outcomes emerge from interdisciplinary approaches around climate action

Issues to be explored

This project will explore how a community articulates its perspectives on social justice and equality with regard to climate resilience. It will consider how interdisciplinary creativity can be researched and applied to activate community climate resilience, as well as how a community can create, own and embed creative outcomes for resilience. It will develop means to best transfer these methods to policy-makers for wider implementation.

Planned outputs

1. Pageant performances in two areas in northern Manchester (Miles Platting and Newton Heath) – see pageant film of St George’s Day Parade, A Green and Pleasant Land
2. Online, open access materials – see animation, Streets Like These, featuring the voices of residents of Miles Platting and Newton Heath
3. A learning and performance pack for schools
4. A toolbox for creative methods workshops for policy practitioners and neighbourhood managers
5. A co-authored paper on interdisciplinary, creative practice for climate resilience
6. A report with recommendations on the transferability of creative practice on climate action for both urban and non-urban area. To be co-developed with partners
7. A core text on communities and climate resilience through arts participation and practice

Further reading

Visit the full project website here.

Photo credit: Unsplash