Using Creativity to Tackle Climate and Racial Injustice: A Reflection

A blog on the NCACE April 2026 Festival of Cultural Exchange roundtable on using creativity to tackle climate and racial justice and the Personal 2 Planetary Brigstow fellowship

I had the pleasure of being a part of NCACE Festival of Cultural Exchange that took place 20-24^th April 2026. The festival aimed to celebrate and shine a light on collaborative research activities, cultural knowledge exchange and diverse partnerships between universities, the arts and cultural sectors and the communities of interest they serve. The festival featured fascinating and inspiring stories of collaborations between universities and the arts and cultural sectors as well as the scope for and value in strengthening these connections further. I was part of a brilliant panel that took place on the final day on the festival entitled, Using Creativity to Tackle Climate and Racial Injustice. Along with Pauline Rutter, an artist, writer and poet and Yaz Brien, a consultant, trainer/coach, facilitator and community organiser and Dr Mai Musié, Senior Manager at NCACE who chaired the session, we formed a roundtable reflecting on the how art activism can drive impactful and meaningful change in the interrelated struggles for climate justice and racial equality.

The session was organised around four key topics; art’s role in freedom struggles and politics, the ways in which art may be in a position to uniquely respond to today’s poly crisis, how art can be non-reductive through the avoidance of reducing communities to symbols of suffering and what ‘bold’ art activism may look like in our current moment. Pauline, Yaz and I each responded to these themes based on our experiences in the world, as artists, writers, thinkers as well as community organisers and activists. What struck me most throughout our conversation was the common thread that we each touched upon, namely that art, in its various forms, is not solely based on a desire for creativity, but is also a means of survival for us.

For example, I spoke about my experiences during the 2024 race riots that took place across the UK. I felt profoundly affected by these, on an emotional and physical level and so the only way I felt I could respond was to create sounds. After each riot, I could barely speak for a few days from a sense of impending fear and unsettling danger. My response was not to counter march, protest or speak, it was to simply be with sound. This was my own quite form of activism, my way of resisting the fear and division stoked through the riots and the narratives that are becoming increasingly prevalent in British politics. I believe that art will become even more important with the cuts to arts and humanities taking place across universities. We also discussed the centrality of community in our work and how community can be based on a number of factors. Place, interests and proximity are often the ways in which communities emerge and are traditionally formed. We touched upon how community can become much more diffuse and sporadic with the rise of digital media, yet digital tools are ways in which we can connect with similar struggles taking place across the world. I found the roundtable to be an interesting and timely light on the relevance of art and art activism now, and the ways in which communities, universities and the arts can build long lasting, trusting relationships based on productive dialogues, meaningful support and non-extraction.

Yaz and I gave an example of the possibilities of this type of collaboration through the Personal 2 Planetary fellowship we were both a part of and met through. Personal 2 Planetary was a year long fellowship from 2024-2025 ran by the Brigstow Institute based at the University of Bristol. Personal 2 Planetary was a new, innovative way of community engagement around issues of climate change from a university that has historically felt exclusive to many of the city’s inhabitants. Brigstow, led by the brilliant Dr Gail Lamboune sought to trial a novel way of conducting a fellowship and working with community and the arts in a non-extractive way. The premise was that Brigstow Institute would bring people together, academics, artists, thinkers, researchers, community activists to think about the important issues around the climate emergency. In a sense it was simple: what will happen if we bring a diverse group of people together to think about the climate? The term Personal 2 Planetary referred to the way in which climate change affects us all from the personal, local experiences of changing climate to larger scale issues affecting the globe. The fellowship was facilitated by the wonderful artist duo Close and Remote who were present to help and prompt the group into ideas, creation and art. The idea that we would simply be given time to think, research, create, write, make art was revolutionary, magical in some ways, as it gave us breathing space to delve deeper into thoughts we otherwise would not have time to.

Through the fellowship I developed two projects, Conversations and Sonic Earth, along with a group created P2P zine. Conversations came out of our discussions around the division in British politics and the need to speak with people on one to one terms. To do this, we set up a canopy at various spots around Bristol and invited people to share their thoughts with us around climate change, with the invitation of free tea and biscuits! The conversations we had were free flowing and interesting, sometimes tense and moving. We also encouraged people to write thoughts who perhaps did not want to talk. We felt these conversations, both verbal and written, were an important experience to come out of the fellowship, teaching us that more conversations and open dialogues are needed in the city.

The second project I developed through the fellowship was Sonic Earth. Sonic Earth is an ecological sound art project that sought to explore earth’s hidden and endangered sounds, in order to further understanding of our world and deepen human connection. Using sonic production and composition, Sonic Earth reflects on the ways in which drawing sounds from the natural world can form part of a liberatory consciousness, centring the earth as a place of aural possibilities, magic and hope. I produced a piece of music inspired by Sonic Earth and my time on the fellowship called After the End of World, premiered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2025. Sonic Earth is an ongoing, personal project of mine that I view as a piece of art activism around climate change.

To conclude, I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the festival roundtable, reflecting on the need of art in today’s world and my own experiences of art activism in collaboration with academic institutions and communities. For me, the key takeaway is that productive and positive knowledge exchange can occur between the arts and cultural sectors, communities and universities, though it is predominately up to the universities with institutional power, resources and space in cities to facilitate these connections in communal and fair ways. I feel my experiences on the Personal 2 Planetary give an example of how this can be done, creating space for people to talk, create and connect.

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