As a geographer and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar, Judith brings a longstanding interest in how human and non-humans actively and materially produce shared worlds, and the role that different forms of knowledge, practice, and expertise play here:
“Looking at the world as an entanglement of humans and non-humans opens upfascinating ways of understanding the relational nature of global challenges and how they might be tackled. I look forward to bringing my expertise in more-than-human approaches to POLART’s analysis of how policy actors, artists and artworks figure in engaging people in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
Judith’s work often deals with highly complex problems. As a result, she brings extensive experience to POLART in collaborating with a broad and diverse range of professionals, members of the public, policymakers, and civil servants, among others. Her previous research has included studies of the origins of scientific forestry in colonial India and their subsequent introduction in the UK; attempted transitions to sustainable forestry and farming; changing landscape aesthetics; impacts of technological changes on forestry and farming cultures and practices; participatory water pollution management; politics of plant biosecurity; and the co-design of post-Brexit agri-environmental policy.
The last holds particular relevance for POLART as it involved assessing how qualitative, arts-informed approaches fared within highly political, government-orchestrated participatory processes. Drawing on these findings and her advisory role in Defra and Natural England’s expert panel on social science evidence from 2018 to 2022, Judith will explore how international policy actors engage with the arts, and how artists and curators negotiate their role as participants in global governance.
A key focus of Judith’s research in recent years has been on the growing role of design and the cultural sector in addressing global challenges. While design was once closely aligned with industrial and economic priorities, both design and the arts are today increasingly looked upon to help tackle complex global concerns such as global warming, sustainability, migration, health concerns and climate change. As a result, designers and, increasingly, artists, are playing visible roles within government, where they help policymakers experiment with new policy approaches and participatory methods.
With a keen interest in the power and politics of knowledge and “expertise,” Judith will also investigate how design and the arts contribute to alternative ways of world-making that challenge dominant, Western models of development and governance:
“As the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar believes, to realise design’s potential for sustainable transitionsrequires a significant reorientation away from the functionalist, rationalistic, and industrial traditions from which it emerged. Design needs to move toward a type of rationality and set of practices that are attuned to the relational dimension of life. For Escobar, design is ontological, and all design-led objects, tools, and even services bring about particular ways of being, knowing and doing*. This perspective aligns closely with how I intend to approach aesthetics, materiality and imagination in global governance in my POLART research.”
Another important strand of Judith’s past research she will build on is her work with Science and Technology Studies-based approaches to participation. These emphasise the performative nature of participation, where participation is not seen as a neutral or pre-given undertaking, but as something that emerges out of how problems are defined, engagement is structured, and participation is envisioned. Today, the arts are widely regarded as playing a key role in fostering public engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals due to their ability to translate abstract, global objectives into human-scale understanding, motivation, and action. Through POLART, Judith will critically investigate these assumptions, thereby seeking to contribute to a better understanding of the role artists and their work play in global sustainability governance and how this involvement is changing the arts.
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* Escobar, A. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University.
Read Judith’s staff profile (link to bio)