SIAH Public Life: Sasha Engelmann ’Elemental lives: geography, animacy and fire weather’

The conversation touches on the elemental as a specific, humanistic lens that helps us tell different sorts of stories about environments, ecologies, histories; the 'stakes' of elemental animacy: contemporary gestures of animating wind in popular culture and media, from the Scirocco and Jugo of southern Europe / Mediterranean, to the Santa Ana 'devils wind' of the Los Angeles fires; issues with theorisations and models of environmental climate 'futures' including 'planetary scenarios', and artistic efforts in storying environments with diverse tools, from environmental sensors to speculative fictions. With Kwame Phillips and Ryan Bishop. Speaker Biography: Sasha Engelmann is a London-based cultural geographer and creative practitioner. Her research centres on long-term collaboration with artist-activist communities; through these collaborations she develops arts and humanities-led tools for environmental knowledge making, and advances the field of the GeoHumanities. Her past work has involved over a decade of collaboration with the international Aerocene Community and Studio Tomás Saraceno; participation in DIY and feminist radio arts collectives including Shortwave Collective and Radio Amatrices; and co-development (with Débora Swistun) of Sensora, a community-led air quality sensing initiative in Argentina. She is co-founder (with Soph Dyer) of the feminist satellite imaging project and network open-weather. Sasha is Reader in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London where she teaches at the intersection of geography and the arts and humanities. SIAH: Public Life Arts and Humanities have always been crucial to the idea of the 'public life': the public is valorised as the realm of collective debate and decision-making, of community and solidarity, of art and culture. Such concepts, of course, have always been contested and never more so than right now. The electronic capture of the commons, the removal of boundaries between work and home, the policing of public spaces, the onslaught of the culture wars, the hold of big data and surveillance, the spectacles of populist politics have all changed the meanings, the spaces and the limits of the public sphere. SIAH: Public Life draws a range of leading intellectuals into conversation about what the ideal of the 'public life' can mean to Arts and Humanities researchers and disciplines in the twenty-first century.