"How might we account for the conditions in which cultural practice operates? How are the impacts of larger systems felt on a local scale? What do we do when the weather takes a turn for the worse?

In Under the Weather, I will discuss the potential of the weather as a metaphorical framework through which the conditions of cultural practice can be understood against a background context of climate breakdown.

The presentation extends a method developed as part of the research project Ecologies of Practice which approaches cultural organisations as distinct ecologies. In this project, The Weather runs as a secondary narrative that documents external forces and pressures (funding and policy, wider socio-political shifts, etc.). In this way, The Weather situates each site of research in wider geographic, social, and economic networks, mapping the specific effects of wider cultural conditions.

This attention to the relationship between a system and its specific effects takes up anthropologist Anna Tsing’s call to “become embroiled in specific situations”.  In her work Friction, Tsing proposes that in order to really know much about the big, abstract, universalizing forces at work in the world we have to pay attention to what happens when they collide with particular situations. It is also a concerted attempt to think across scales, echoing Prof Deborah R Coen’s description of the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”— the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world – in her book Climate in Motion.

Although this approach employs metaphor as method, it is also an attempt to work with ecological principals underpinning practice. Writing about cultural practice as a practice of weathering offers a way to think through the complex social, material, economic, and environmental entanglements of climate change and embed environmental issues as not only a thematic but an imperative that shifts modes of practice."