SSAP Urban Research Program Seminar Series

Event Name
SSAP Urban Research Program Seminar Series
Date
4 May 2018
Time
12:00 pm - 01:00 pm
Location
Parramatta Campus

Address (Room): PS.EHa.130

Description
How might we progress geographical research that cares? This seminar addresses how we can examine, and responsibly engage with, distressed environments and potentially traumatised communities in urban recovery processes. I will present preliminary findings ensuing from fieldwork conducted in Christchurch in April–May 2018 in relation to my current research mobility project CARED: Community Art & Recovery in Environments Disrupted by Disasters. The city of Christchurch faced a series of devastating earthquakes in 2010–11 which involved 185 fatalities and significant material loss. This city has undergone a remarkable transition, considering the demolition of about three quarters of the buildings in the centre as part of an on-going US$30 billion repair and construction programme. In this post-disaster urban landscape context, Christchurch acts as host to burgeoning publicly commissioned art and grassroots community art initiatives, making this city a particularly arresting case. My fieldwork has been in partnership with the cultural geographer Dr David Conradson at the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, and in further collaboration with local planners and arts and community groups with the aim to generate significant new insights into: (1) how community and public art projects articulate and create space for difference in a post-disaster city, and (2) the ways in which community and public art thereby contribute to more just and socially inclusive urban futures. Prior to my fieldwork in Christchurch, I provided the ex ante seminar How Do We Care? in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne to discuss the project’s methodological and ethical aspects and challenges. In the ex post context of this project, my invited address, How Did We Care?, will illuminate ‘fresh’ primary research findings about any transformative community experiences and the social and political possibilities of art-led post-disaster urban recovery. With this seminar, I will aim to continue my efforts to pool expertise and exchange insights to establish a space for co-learning across our multidisciplinary research agendas. As such, I will hope to further internationalise the debate about the intersecting geographies of art and urban recovery and the geographies of care, both of the relational self/researcher and the other/researched.

Speakers: Dr Martin Zebracki

Contact
Name: Professor Andrew Gorman-Murray

a.gorman-murray@westernsydney.edu.au

School / Department: School of Social Sciences and Psychology