Limited Tickets Remain: Synthetic Histories: Plastics, Climate and Colonialism

Alice Read's picture
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
January 27, 2023
Location: 
United Kingdom
Subject Fields: 
Humanities, Popular Culture Studies, Social Sciences, Urban History / Studies, World History / Studies

**Limited Online Tickets Remaining (In person sold out)**

Synthetic Histories: Plastics, Climate and Colonialism

Location: V&A Dundee and Online

Bringing together thinking from V&A Dundee's latest exhibition, 'Plastic: Remaking our World' and the Paul Mellon Centre's multi-year project, Climate & Colonialism, this symposium explores the complex past, problematic present and possible futures of plastic.

Following a private viewing of the exhibition, participants will join international researchers, designers, artists and activists in a series of discussions, presentations and more to consider plastics, climate and colonialism as sets of interconnected material and extractive relations.

The symposium will ask:

  • Where did plastic come from?
  • How do we understand its colonial histories?
  • How are art, craft and design practices implicated in these extractive processes, and how do they challenge them?
  • What is the ongoing impact of climate injustice and the unequal impact of global waste streams on people and the planet?
  • Is there a future post-plastic?
  • What role do artists, designers and environmental humanities researchers play in creating such futures?

Synthetic Histories: Plastics, Climate and Colonialism is convened by Sria Chatterjee, (Paul Mellon Centre); Nichol Keene, Charlotte Hale and Laurie Bassam (V&A Dundee).