Climate Justice Conversations with Elly Clarke & Cliff Hammett

Image: Elly Clarke

The following is a conversation with Elly Clarke and Cliff Hammett, former members of the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE) Climate Justice Network. They worked together with Karolina Szpyrko, Katriona McGlade, Naomi Hennig and Marleen Boschen to create Climate Justice Conversations, a set of cards that helps researchers and students in the arts and humanities explore how to research amidst environmental emergency, and plot new approaches to living and inquiring justly. Elly is an artist and researcher who recently completed a practice-based PhD titled Is My Body Out of Date? The drag of Physicality in the Digital Age. Their thesis explored how to expand ideas and practices of drag to highlight how we are all templated and scripted, particularly in relation to the digital. Cliff recently completed a PhD in the Creative and Critical Practice Program at the University of Sussex. His thesis was called Nightsniffing and used urban planning data and the practice of bat walking—going out with detectors looking for bats. He used this data to contextualise the practice of bat walking and de-spectacularize wildlife.

Could you tell me how you started working together and thought about developing Climate Justice Conversations?

Elly Clarke (EC): Cliff and I met at the University of Sussex. I started my PhD at Sussex before moving to Goldsmiths. Cliff, Karolina and I were at the CHASE Conference in Summer 2019, and during three days of presentations by PhD researchers and keynote speakers, there was not a single mention of the climate crisis. Not across any of the different topics people talked about, including research in India, flying here, flying there, using these extractivist tactics - the three of us were struck! Everyone left, and we stood there, stunned. We thought, how can this be a legitimate way to be in this world right now? There and then, standing outside the lecture theater when everyone had disappeared in a puff of smoke, we realised we need to do something about it, we need to find a way to talk about the climate crisis, the impact of it on research, how people are dealing with it, how people are managing to deal with it by not dealing with it at all, when it's so present.

A pan-disciplinary group came together to form the CHASE Climate Justice Network. We organised sharing events and managed a small grants award. But mostly we wanted the network to be a place where people could come together and talk about what's happening. The following year, COVID came in. In 2021, we organised Taking Care in a Time of Climate Crisis, which took place on the gamified platform of Gathertown and commissioned artist Andrea Khora to construct an environment for it. It was an online exhibition and conference where, on this Gathertown platform, you see the little avatars running across the pixellated environment because they're late getting to this particular talk over here (which you can only hear when your avatar is positioned within a certain proximity of the speaker). After the long months of COVID lockdowns, the Gathertown platform offered an embodied experience of coming together. Participants embedded their artworks, their films, and even their performances onto the platform; we even had a mini dance party at the end, to a themed collaborative playlist. Our mission has always been about how to provide more platforms and models for these discussions to take place, and particularly for artistic research. Climate isn't just something that environmentalists worry about—we need to find ways to incorporate the consideration of climate justice into everybody's work, which is accessible and not masked by certain language.

Screenshot from (Taking) Care in a Time of Climate Crisis - a one-day gathering of art, videos and performances that took place in April 2021 in a specially created Gathertown environment 

For me, everything came to a head in 2019, the same summer as the conference mentioned earlier, when I was invited to present a paper at Deacon University in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. At that point, I still had funding, meaning that CHASE would have paid for me to go all the way there to present this networked, 20-minute (parallel session) performance about the online/offline body. I had just been hit hard by climate grief, and couldn’t stomach getting on a plane all this way to do this. So I found two local artists - Bon Mott and Kori MIles - to attend the conference and perform in my place. CHASE were really good about this, and agreed to cover the fees of the artists instead of my travel costs - but the resistance my idea was met with by the conference organisers, when I said I didn’t want to fly across the world to present for 20 minutes and had found another solution was palpable - they said ‘this is a conference about embodied knowledge, so we really prefer people to be there.’ But the following year, everything was on Zoom, as you know. 

We realised then that there is no decarbonization without decolonisation. Many of the templates of research are imperialist and extractivist, embedded within the whole structure of how academia is done, the way knowledge is unearthed, found and claimed. Alongside the lack of consideration of issues of climate, there was the complete obliviousness towards these really out-of-date templates of colonial extractivism that are still being rewarded and given this huge platform.

Cliff Hammett (CH): I remember the conference very well. We were getting more and more befuddled through the day at what was happening, having conversations with people when they're going, oh, yes, I'm flying across the world to give a half-hour talk. This sense of it being a bit of a jolly. It seemed to me there was a very pervasive, what I call, everyday climate denialism. It's not a full-throated, oh no, climate change isn't happening. Rather, it's more, oh yes, I intellectually acknowledge that we're in a crisis, and this is really bad. But then people do nothing and act no differently. You plan your whole life, although you know, in 30 years, there definitely will be an academy, although this is all known and certain. I just felt like we were going a little crazy. Everyone seemed to be on a bit of a parallel stratum. 

Playing devil's advocate, and please do appreciate I'm playing devil's advocate, two things come to mind here in terms of challenging the narrative you guys have presented. One is that some people feel that academia is very removed or irrelevant to their lives. The other is in relation to arguments that individual actions don't make a difference because so much of the climate emergency is about structural issues. With these concerns in mind, how would you respond to the argument that what a few academics do won’t make any difference to the climate, or even many people’s thinking about the climate? 

EC: What we were really interested in doing was providing a space to talk about the climate crisis. To talk in a non-intellectual way about what was happening within the academy, what was happening with and within our bodies. What do you do with this grief? What do you do with this befuddledness that comes of being in these contexts? These are people who are starting out in these careers where they're studying to become authorities in all these different fields. But at that point, there was really no space for it. All the different groups that existed within the CHASE network - none were talking about climate. 

In my experience, it can be a really tiny conversation or experience, or seeing an artwork, or taking part in some participatory action that can really make a difference. And this is where the card game comes in - conversations are between more than one person, and every single person in academia has relationships with people who are not in the academy. Children, different generations, all of that.

That's also where the cards felt like a better idea than a PDF of a handbook that would just sit on people's shelves - because of how they bring people together in conversation. They can be played on all different levels and generations. They can also just be fun. Considering climate doesn't need to be so heavy - finding a way to lighten and share the impact of what's happening, but also to make it more colourful, was one of the things we hope our cards do. 

Regarding academia being irrelevant, I mean, this is something I'm struggling with a lot at the moment, navigating tiny, temporary contracts that offer no security or consistency, which makes me wonder if I can continue teaching. The structures of academia in the UK right now are becoming more and more challenging to deal with. But academics and theorists have made massive changes in the world. We need academia as it provides a dedicated thinking space that not many other jobs or fields of work provide. 

CH: Yeah, it's interesting, because it reminded me of Joanna Zylinska, who has this idea of derangements of scale—the idea that you can boil less water in your kettle, and somehow this will affect the system of systems that is the climate. At the same time, I wonder if we were really trying to act in this consequentialist way, asking what the biggest impact one can have? There's also this question of, on quite a personal level, living in bad faith. Even if you can't, even if you're not at a fulcrum to deal with a problem, you try to live in a way that acknowledges the problem. That it's a real issue for your ethical and intellectual integrity if you're not acknowledging what is happening in whatever practice you're engaged in. I think for me, even if it makes zero difference, ultimately, to the actual pragmatic reality of what's happening, it still has a value.

That’s pretty much how I think about it. The desire, or need, to live an ethical life that acknowledges the issue. I also agree that even if academia feels distant from a lot of people, that doesn’t mean that the knowledge produced within the academy isn't valuable, and actually, a game like this might be a way to bridge a gap between academic practice and how people generally talk about climate issues. On that note, it might be helpful if you describe how the game works.

CH: The fundamentals of the game are that we have a deck of cards that has a theme linking or exploring issues to do with the environment and climate, issues of social justice, and the practice of intellectual inquiry. I've got one card in front of me now, Fossil, and on it, we have a picture of a fossil, and three words: time, loss, and future. These are all to give little prompts to help somebody make connections. 

People draw three cards at random, and it gives a number of different themes or ideas to work with. Then, in the very base version of the game, they are asked to respond to a question: What work needs to be done to attend to climate justice? They've got three scales at which to answer the question, and they can choose the one that they'd like to address: in my own research or practice, in my own discipline or sector, or in my own institution or organisation.

Then the person tries to answer that question, drawing on the card's title, the images, and the keywords. Players are encouraged to draw connections between the cards. They can narrativise the card, say this is the beginning, this is the problem, this is where I want to get to, but they can use it in quite a flexible way. This would normally be done in a small group. People talk together, and people respond and ask questions, and maybe use the cards themselves. People can point out connections and thoughts, for example, between a network card, which links to what the other player is saying. It gives you some visual and cognitive resources to draw on to have a fuller conversation, and maybe a more unexpected conversation about how climate justice relates to one's research, work and discipline.

Is there any timing structure to this? Do players have as long as they want to talk about the cards in front of them, and can people interject whenever appropriate?

EC: We don't put a time on it. People tend to talk for around 15 or 20 minutes. It can get really heated, actually. That was something we didn't expect, where people start laying into someone for their discipline, like, art history is colonial, and so on. When we tested it at CHASE conferences, and in some other places where people are teaching, we had to lay some ground rules about keeping it to the question or to the discipline that's there; to not critique this one individual for whole structures they didn't build themselves. I remember someone being laid into who was an art historian - it actually became quite uncomfortable for this person, and Karolina and I, who were running the session, had to interject. We all come out of these systems, and that's why it can become extremely heated. We wanted these cards to be fun and all the rest of it, but, you know, there can be a desire to shift blame or to put blame in a certain place; we want this to complicate that.

We found that when people don't know each other and each other's disciplines, versus when they know each other's work quite well, it brings different scales of interaction. It's very hard, even within your own practice, for example, with my own work, how I link the fossil to drag. Then other people come in, that's where the conversation becomes really rich and multi-vocal. When people who don't know each other's discipline it works on a different level, it's an encountering of your own work. 

It sounds like the majority of the games being played are between academics or people within academic institutions. Obviously, that's where it started, but who do you want to play this game? Do you see this spreading to non-academic contexts? 

CH: We originally designed it for an academic context, and in some ways, this is an artefact of where we were coming from and where our funding came from. We had to produce something related to the framework of doctoral training. That shaped the deck. We have had people contact us who want to use it in a completely different setting, like a community setting. I think if you just ignore the rulebook, you can use the cards more broadly, because they're fundamentally quite open. They’re geared towards academia, or something like an art institution, or a charity, something quite institutional. 

We found with COTT, which are obviously quite arts-based, if you shift the word artist to something else, a lot of the cards can still work fairly well. A slight reframing through just one word can actually open it up to a bigger or different audience.

EC: Yeah, I agree, I think that would work with Climate Justice Conversations, as well.

CH: Yeah, that’s a question we've had, whether at some point we'd want to produce a second edition that is a little more open, or geared slightly differently. 

EC: I love the idea that the cards could be in public libraries, that there'd be a set in every public library, a set in every... even primary school. Although we'd probably need to adapt some of it for children. You could change a few words, but basically, what you want to be doing is have a conversation about people's lives in relation to climate justice, in whichever form that takes, however people are using their energy.

CH: It's also worth noting how the connectivity, this practice of connecting cards, is quite particular. Some people, because they've done activities like this, can jump straight in. For some people, it is a massive struggle. This includes one person who was a literature PhD student. You would think that somebody like that would be able to engage with this, but they found it incredibly challenging. It’s been very unexpected, the patterns of who could work with it very easily and for whom it was a bit of a struggle. Which is not to say that when it's a struggle, it somehow failed. Struggling with these ideas and with the activity can be valuable in itself. 

EC: I've witnessed someone really struggling with the cards, but then it's really interesting how other people feed in and ask other questions. That's about generosity and about the cards as catalysts. They don't give answers, they catalyse questions, and then those questions that emerge, all those thoughts then bring about another conversation that would not happen without these prompts, and this set-up.

In relation to that, there’s currently quite a big emphasis on interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity within academic practices. I’ve thought about this a lot with my own research and with COTT. Some people see interdisciplinarity as bringing their expertise into a group, and some see it as leaving their expertise at the door. It doesn't matter what the expertise is, whether it's English Literature or Geography, whatever it might be, being open to other expertise is a different skill than having an expertise. It seems very difficult for people to sideline their expertise in the face of someone else's when they're not in the same field.

Was this a background motivation in designing the cards? To get people who maybe can't, won't, or don't see how to collaborate, to come together around this issue, which affects everyone, and can only be addressed through an interdisciplinary effort? 

EC: That underpins my whole practice as an artist, completely. I've always done community-engaged projects, oral history projects, and have always tried to find ways to bring people together to talk across divides. That's one of the things I really struggled with doing a PhD. I had a lot of conversations with my supervisors, who wanted me to write in this very academic form, and I always resisted it. The climate justice group that we set up was completely interdisciplinary. We were all doing very different projects, and it was a real joy to collaborate on this, whilst also doing our different things.

I've been on Cliff's bat walks; he's been in many of my weird online drag performances. To understand people through the work they're doing, and to understand people through the effects they're trying to make through their work, is interdisciplinary. The excuse to bring people together in a group for a conversation, in this context of so much isolation in the face of all this technology, is also to have people sitting around a table, or sitting around a computer with the online version, interacting, having conversations that can be really pithy, but also funny. You get some really funny card combinations sometimes, and that can be hilarious. It reminds us of exactly what we share.  In our group, making this, we weren’t thinking that any of us were particularly experts, quite the reverse. I think maybe because none of us was exactly writing a PhD that addressed climate justice, we were coming at it from all these different sides and angles. 

Both Cliff and I are working with data, but we're doing such different things with data, in such different ways. I'm using the platforms that I'm also critiquing. I'm doing stuff on Google Forms, etc. Cliff's hacking things and doing completely different stuff. It's been really good to work in that transdisciplinary group for a very long period of time, and there isn't much opportunity within our educational structure to do that. I think the card game has really emerged out of these very different projects that we were each doing, whilst also developing this in dialogue with other people that we met along the way.

I hate the idea of presenting myself as an expert; I've always struggled with it, but cultivating a position of being an expert at not being an expert has been helpful. Going into every situation and having the confidence to not know.

In relation to the questions of game format being desirable, I think it's quite interesting listening to you both, because you both deal with technologies and digital data, capital D data. You've got an excellent online practice version, but ultimately, the cards are an embodied physical thing. Do you want them to remain primarily physical, first and foremost?

EC: Yes, definitely. We had lots of conversations about the size of the card, the format, the weight of the paper, all of that. The tactility of it is really important. People have said it's really nice to hold the cards. For me, embodied knowledge and what you learn through your body being in different spaces, vibrating alongside different people sitting around a table, is important. There is all this knowledge that doesn't even make it to a language that is productive. On Cliff's bat walks, when there's no sound, when there aren't any bats, you're still in this thing with people, and it's those incidental chats that I feel are just as important as the lecture. The chat you have by the water dispenser, or choosing which gluten-free cupcake you want on the table. I've been making work around the idea of technology, community and communication since the 90s, and have seen how each technological thing, that's meant to bring us together, actually separates us. I wrote my MA dissertation in 2002, saying that polarisation would happen because we only get our own news feeds that only show the news we want. Where does that end up? I suppose my whole 25-year career as an artist has been about trying to find ways to bring people together across differences, and having people sit around a table doing almost anything.  Playing a game gives that gives a focus and gives a menu of topics you can talk about does some work.

CH: It's not something I'd previously thought about in relation to this. A lot of my own practice has been trying to physicalize and embody quite abstract processes. One project I worked on with some collaborators was using data extraction to brew tea, making a tea blend that you could then drink. The whole card game was born when we were on a retreat, visiting an observatory. There's an artistic research centre there. I remember we'd written out a large document where we'd laid out what was supposed to be some toolkit or guide to thinking about climate justice. It's interesting, I don't know whether that environment helped us pivot to the card game. We were in this communal place where we got to spend a lot of time physically together. With Katie, with whom we were working, I think it was literally the first time we'd met her physically. It's really interesting thinking about how it relates to our practices, but also how the cards are a product of a particular environment that changed what we were doing.

EC: Yeah, I think that's true, Cliff. We went on walks together, cooked together, slept in dormitories together; it was very embodied, and that totally shifted the game. I think what also happened during that trip was realising that a toolkit suggests there are answers to all of this. A toolkit suggests that if I do this, this, and this, then it's fine. That is not true at all, and also, our context is changing all the time. We need to have something that is going to catalyse more questions, because if people start asking questions, we see the answers are also different for every person. What's better to do in terms of climate justice changes within one person's practice or context? Silly things like, do you print out or not? Don't print to save the environment, but then you've got a whole conference of people, every time they need to look at the program, they have to fire up millions of devices. Every single issue is complicated. In the end, we thought, let's have cards; the main thing is to get people thinking more naturally about some of these things that we're all dealing with. How can we equip people with the tools to speak about these things in their own languages, and not have to learn a set of new terms? 

The cards have pictures, and that takes people back to being children, to storybooks, and then each card has just got 3 guiding words that you can either take on, or not. The cards put you in dialogue, and people help each other. Even in trying to think about other people's practice can be as valuable, if not more so, than your own. With a bit of distance, you can really see how these things intersect, and clash, and don't intersect. A lot comes out of the conversations that I think can't be quantified, but the conversations I've had through it stay, and the emotions that come up through it stay. That shows the depth and gravity of those interactions. 

The potential for asking questions about your own discipline is broadened massively when you're thinking about someone from another discipline. I like the idea of continually open-ended questions; rather than answers, it's just more questions. The actions that an English PhD person can take, and then the actions that a Chemist can take, are not the same, and why would they be? Why have a set of answers that are complete and discrete? 

Could one of you tell me about the CHASE Climate Network, and about how CHASE funded the game? 

CH: The CHASE Climate Justice Network is funded through the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, which is one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council DTPs.  They have a pot of money for student-led training. Initially, the network was set up using funding through this channel. Things like the CHASE Feminist Network (which I think still exists) gave us a template for how we could think about what we were doing. They then formalised the idea of having funded networks within the doctoral training partnership, and we were able to apply each year, and then each year we would apply for something that would progress the cards. We applied to do the retreat at Bidston Observatory. Also,  we got money to pay Rory Midhani, the artist, to do the work on the cards. Eventually, we applied for money to print them.

EC: We had to fill in separate funding applications each year to keep the network going. We did extra applications to get extra cash for specific events. The funding wasn't automatic; we had to consider beforehand and plan. 

Who owns the cards? I ask this less in terms of whose intellectual property the cards are, but more if you guys decide that you want to extend this further and find some funds from somewhere to get more printed, could you do that, or does it belong to CHASE? 

CH: From recollection, CHASE has the right to reproduce the cards. We've given them access to the design masters; if they ever want to produce a new edition of the cards, they can do that. We can also do it and go off in our own direction, or adapt the cards. I believe the artwork still belongs to Rory, but we have an unlimited license for its use. We’ve generally been given a decent amount of freedom. If we want to take this off in a different direction, I think CHASE probably just want us to keep acknowledging them. Other than that, I think we've got complete flexibility.

I wonder if an individual university had funded this, it would have been a straightforward and amicable agreement. I wonder if an individual university would have taken more ownership over it. 

EC: Yeah, like a press. 

Yes, exactly.

CH: It's an interesting question. I think because it's a doctoral training route, they don't think in those terms; it's more about helping students. 

Elly Clarke: We had conversations regarding selling packs of cards. It could raise money for a climate justice organisation, for instance. I think if we’d wanted to sell them commercially, it might have raised difficulties. One thing about the art world, or Arts Council projects, you try to apply for seed funding towards something that can eventually be commercial on some level, and it gets rejected. Funding structures are there to protect this unusual space of knowledge creation without the need to make money. 

In terms of researchers on or with the cards, do you collect data on how the game is being used, and do you know the game is doing what you wanted it to do?

CH: We haven't done it in any formalised way. I think partly because we couldn't, it wouldn’t have been tenable for us, because you need to go through an ethics process. We were really on the seat of our pants in terms of actually getting this done alongside our PhDs, so we never built that element into it. We had a much more practical experience; we had this rough version of the cards with our own little sketches and the words that we took to various workshops, and we were engaged in conversations with people before printing a nice edition. We could see how it was going. We'd ask people for feedback, some of it we took on board, some of it we didn't.

We know how it affects people in the room, but it would be nice do some follow-up and see whether these activities can, subtly, shift people a little. If I did it in a research context, I would want to analyse how the game is played, but also see if this is something people just leave in the room, or if it is able to shift somebody's thinking.

EC: We did talk at one point about setting up a digital visitor's book through a QR code, where people could write their stories of playing with the cards. But then, someone has to monitor it. We liked the idea that the cards themselves could create some network, and we talked about one set being passed around from person to person, building its own story. A bit like the magicness of a set of tarot cards is how different people hold them. What happened to this one set, and where did it go? But all those things just take a lot of management and monitoring, and we are all literally at the end of our PhDs, about to step off the platform.

People were very generous about sharing their experiences of the cards and what they found difficult. That really helped us shape it, but since they've actually been out in the world, since the launch, we haven't really had much of a chance to really monitor how they've been used since. 

CH: No, from time to time, we get an email from someone saying they saw this person who had a set, or ask for a set of cards for something that we're doing. It’s really nice when you receive those emails, and to know that they're at least making an impression. That they motivated someone in some way. 

Were there any other games that fed into the design, or the inspiration for making a game, or how you structured the game?

EC: I mean, for the structure, definitely Tarot, as a tool for looking.

CH:  John Walter’s Tarot Deck and his exhibition, Alien Sex Club at Ambika P3. He designed a tarot for people to talk about their sex lives. I think, although I'd seen it 5 years previously, that definitely opened my mind to the use of cards as a way to have what might be quite a challenging conversation.

I was lucky enough to get a tarot reading from Walter at Plymouth Art Weekender in 2020. I love that set, it's brilliant.

CH: Yeah, that was definitely something that influenced me; it might not have been on the surface of my mind, but I think it was definitely there. 

EC: I like Harun Morrison’s Environmental Justice Questions Cards game, but that didn't influence us, because our cards were already printed by then. The more of these things there are in the world, the better. 

For me, building intimacy where people can share things is very important. It's like bell hooks’ danger zone of learning. She says, we need to create a space that feels safe enough to get into the danger zone. I think, in a way, the cuteness of Rory’s design of the cards, which is cartoony, very non-threatening, was part of this thinking of making a safe space from which to launch into more dangerous conversational territory. 

We wanted something that didn't look like a textbook, a game that people can relate to on different levels, and that somehow can also create a sense of intimacy through which these conversations can happen. People often talked about the conversations that happened online. You get these completely random people sitting in their different places having these very intense conversations around this card game, and one person screenshares, and the other picks the cards, and then they have a conversation. There was something really beautiful about that. Cliff and I are obsessed with the ways technology governs our lives, and playing online really talked about the hybrid world that we live in.