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.
Bio
Isabel Galleymore is a British poet and scholar specializing in environmental literature. Her debut poetry collection, Significant Other, won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020, and her second collection, Baby Schema, was longlisted for the Laurel Ecopoetry Prize in 2024. Her poems have featured in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also the author of Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics and has published widely on ecopoetics, ecofeminism, cute studies, and theories of humour. In 2022–23, Isabel was a Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and in 2023–24 she was awarded a Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI) for her project ‘Cuteness in Contemporary Environmental Culture: Developing Ecopoetic Practice’. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.
Al-An deSouza
Idylls of American Carnage
Dystopian times of unfettered xenophobia, governmental corruption, and restrictions on education and free speech demand enhanced cultural literacies. Yet the visual literacy we teach in art schools often remains disconnected from the historical and political structures that shape what images do and how they circulate. This talk examines how seemingly neutral artworks selected for recent U.S. presidential inaugurations have been deployed to celebrate the dream of american utopianism, and more specifically to represent administration interests in the production of political ideology. Close readings of the works expose contested battlegrounds that suggest idyllic landscape as images of aftermaths, that the “american carnage” coined by and increasingly enacted by the current administration is in fact central to an understanding of these artworks, including the ones chosen by this administration. Beginning with conventional formal analysis— material, composition, color, light, etc., —the works are interpreted through speculations on geography, nation, race, gender, of who is seen to belong and who is quietly excluded. Art historical contexts provide further tools for interpretation. The talk argues that landscape painting functions not merely as representation but as a cultural technology that naturalizes territorial possession, settler colonialism, and national belonging. It traces how nineteenth-century landscape traditions continue to inform contemporary political aesthetics, including renewed forms of american imperialism and state spectacle. By combining art historical analysis with reflections on pedagogy and critical viewing, the talk proposes the classroom as a site where historical meaning can be collectively negotiated rather than passively received. It ultimately argues for a critical model of visual literacy that foregrounds the entanglement of aesthetic pleasure, historical violence, and political agency.
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)