Skip to main content
Story

UAL Research Season - Earth and Equity: integrating environmental and racial justice

Photograph of an art piece by Sonia Boyce
Photograph of an art piece by Sonia Boyce
Sonia Boyce, I'm With Her Too, 2019. Limited edition produced for Chisenhale Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Chisenhale Gallery.
Written by
Cat Cooper Published date
16 February 2021

UAL Research Season is back for March 2021. Throughout the month, all 6 UAL Colleges, 3 active Institutes and 9 Research Centres will host events showcasing the rich diversity of UAL research, with a special focus on the theme Earth and Equity: integrating environmental and racial justice.

With over 50 events - more than half of them open to the public- hear about the projects, platforms and people working to progress environmental and racial justice across UAL: referencing Black Lives Matter and racial justice, climate change, COVID-19, decolonisation, intersectionality, sustainability and social design. We’ll also reflect on work across our 4 research themes: Digital Futures, Community & Resilience, Living with Environmental Change, and Health and Wellbeing. Research Season is co-ordinated by the UAL Research Professoriate.

Throughout March, we will be celebrating the huge diversity of disciplines and practices embraced in our university culture, from PhD students to staff at all levels. We encourage colleagues, students and the public to explore our programme of virtual events and hope you will join us to engage with the key themes guiding our research at UAL

— Dr Pratāp Rughani, Chair, UAL Professoriate

Intersectionality and Planetary Health - 1 March

Helping us to better understand the issues framing our responsibilities as individuals and as an institution, our first Research Season event, on 1 March, Intersectionality and Planetary Health, proposes that the huge social, political, cultural, environmental and health challenges of our time must be understood collectively, in the context of each other. It takes the form of an In Conversation talk between David Cross, Reader, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL and Janine Francois, Acting Course Leader, BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins, UAL. Chaired by Professor Pratāp Rughani, Chair of the UAL Research Professoriate and Professor Charlotte Hodes, Co-Chair.

As academics leading in this area, David and Janine will present an unusually challenging conversation - critically engaging with a key human dimension of the social-ecological crisis from different subject positions.

To mark the launch of Research Season 2021, this event will open with a short address from UAL Vice-Chancellor Sir Nigel Carrington, followed by David Isaac CBE, Chair of the UAL Board of Governors, sharing brief words of reflection from his career in the fields of justice and ethics.

UAL staff and students will later respond creatively to this discussion in Planetary Health - a creative sanatorium: a series of 3 linked workshops led by David Cross and Gabriele Grigorjeva, considering what artists can do to respond during this ambiguous time.

Find out more

I'm with her too (2019)

UAL would like to thank Sonia Boyce, UAL Chair In Black Art & Design for the use of her artwork I'm With Her Too (2019) - a limited edition produced for Chisenhale Gallery as part of the gallery’s Archive Editions series.

I’m With Her Too (2019) references a found placard from the New York Women’s march in response to the results of the 2016 United States presidential election. The edition includes the written statement ‘I’m with her’ as a call for solidarity, celebrating the positive energy generated in movements of social and collective action. The print maps hand-drawn arrows that point outwards and beyond the edge of the margins of the paper, giving a sense of infinity. I’m With Her Too (2019) continues Sonia’s interest in rallying a sense of the social, in order to connect the viewer with the potential for change.