Introduction

When it comes to addressing the climate crisis, one usually assumes that viable forms of action include protests, advocacy, and political interventions. But what about art? How does art making intersect with and propel social and environmental activism? Visual artists and makers from across Southeast Asia seek to effect climate justice through the fundamental practice of art, and they imagine and propose caring futures through their works. This module situates “care” as a method and a mode of attention to ground writing and research about ongoing eco-social crises as explored in collaborative art projects from around the region.

In many parts of Southeast Asia, the harrowing “futures” of the climate crisis have arrived and have been arriving for a long time. To more deeply understand what this means and looks like among affected groups, we must learn how to become attuned, undertaking the care-ful work of gaining sensitivity across difference. “Care” is thus a framework that requires lingering with human and non-human beings to listen to their stories as they are drawn together into creative representational modes that span diverse media, including installations, films, paintings, sculpture, textiles, and land and environmental art. By engaging these media, students will learn how to undertake close analysis of artworks while connecting them to the broader cultural contexts and communities in which they are produced, using methodologies gleaned from art history, anthropology, visual studies, geography, and science and technology studies.

We will read a range of texts from those disciplines to think about how to evaluate texts’ arguments and positions, and how to craft written analysis that emerges from and is carefully supported by different forms of evidence. Since many of the art projects we will discuss have been created with the intention of raising awareness among diverse publics, students will work on sequenced writing assignments that are designed to reach different audiences by experimenting with various writing styles and genres.

Learning Outcomes

Students in this module will develop their skills in academic writing and writing across genres. They will become proficient in analysis, argumentation, rhetorical organization, and persuasion strategies that can be deployed when writing across disciplines and professional contexts.

By the end of the module, students will be able to:

• Effectively utilize the conventions of academic writing in their own work.
• Engage texts critically and evaluate their arguments and assumptions.
• Identify sources needed to connect arguments and analysis with evidence.
• Learn to interpret written and visual texts for their subtle and hidden meanings.
• Identify issues in reasoning, argumentation, and the use of sources.
• Work collaboratively with peers by engaging in peer review to improve the quality of a text.

Module Structure

The module is divided into three units. In unit one, students read texts and consider artworks in order to develop a shared conceptualization of “care” and the skills needed to understand and interpret individual works of art. In unit two, individual works of art are more broadly contextualized in relationship to communities and climate emergencies that they depict, and in some cases, in relationship to communities that have produced them. This unit thinks about the limits and possibilities of collaboration in art and in climate justice movements. The third unit deals with the politics and practices of curation in museums and other institutions. It considers the ways curators imagine their interventions in the museum/gallery/exhibition space, and how audiences engage and perceive these interventions.