Abstract

This paper will reflect on the underlying motivations and tensions sitting
 behind a project generated by a partnership between the Open University’s 
Geography Department, Sheffield University’s Architecture Department and the 
new economics foundation (nef), that seeks to provoke and test re-framings of
 environmental change in the public sphere. 

The Interdependence Day project (ID)
 is a research, communications and participation project centred on taking a fresh tone and approach to issues around environment, development and globalization. ID is politically explicit, but frank about
 its experimental and uncertain status as a project. It has revolved around
 a distinctive mix of public events, publications, art practice and academic/policy seminars. These 
activities have started to probe the potency of the concept of 
interdependence for public understanding of and responses to environmental change at a moment when the density of relations between the ecological, the social and the political are so evident. The work has arisen out of an extended programme of 
action research on media and environmental change by one of the project
 partners Joe Smith, and in architectural design teaching, research and art 
practice by Renata Tyszczuk. The paper will reflect upon the usually implicit
 ethical and political commitments that researchers and participants are delivered into by 
dint of their ‘knowing about climate change’. It will say some provocative 
things about the distinctive responsibilities that the issue carries for
 research, art practice, interdisciplinarity and the politics of knowledge
 mediation.