Artist Pedagogy and Artistic Thinking: Abstracts 27 August 2026
Isabel Galleymore
Get Unserious: Playfulness in Environmental Writing and the Arts
Environmental writing is often associated with a distinctive tonal register: reverent, attentive, and morally serious. Across creative practice and pedagogical contexts, writers, artists and students frequently encounter implicit expectations about how the environment should be represented, often channelling experiences of awe and a heightened sense of ethical responsibility for the ecological crisis. While these modes have produced powerful and necessary forms of ecological attention, they also shape what environmental writing feels permitted to do and say, and who feels able to participate in it.
This keynote explores what becomes possible when these expectations are unsettled. What happens when we refuse a script of sincerity? What forms of ecological thinking emerge when humour and awkwardness enter the field? Rather than rejecting reverence or ethical engagement, the talk considers how moments of pop-cultural reference and formal play can open alternative routes into environmental thought. Drawing on my own experience as an ecopoet and recent developments in ecopoetry, this keynote examines how different playful modes in environmental writing can complicate familiar ideas about nature. These poetic strategies not only invite new ways of understanding our relationships with environments, nonhumans and ecological crisis, they are also indicative of a larger shift in the scholarship of ecocriticism.
Drawing ecopoetic and artistic examples into dialogue with pedagogy, the keynote reflects on how playfulness might function in the classroom. If environmental discourse often arrives already weighted with urgency and moral gravity, a number of pedagogical opportunities emerge when students are encouraged to approach ecological questions through seemingly incongruous and experimental routes. As such, this keynote suggests that playfulness can operate not as a retreat from ecological crisis but as a generative critical method for thinking, writing, and teaching the environment today.
Al-An deSouza
The title and abstract will be updated later.
Bio
Al-An deSouza is an artist and educator working across photo-media, installation, text, and performance. deSouza is Professor of Photography and former department Chair of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley. Their artworks have been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at Tate Britain, London; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. deSouza’s two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought (Duke University Press, 2018), examines art pedagogy and critique, and how some of the most common terms used to discuss art may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges; Ark of Martyrs (Sming Sming Books, 2020), is a polyphonic, dysphoric rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness. deSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.
Exhibition archive: https://www.talwargallery.com/artists/al-an-desouza#tab:slideshow
Essay archive: https://berkeley.academia.edu/AlAndeSouza
Recent books:
Ark of Martyrs: An Autobiography of V, 2020 (Sming Sming Books)
How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change, 2018 (Duke Uni. Press)