Written by Clara Wilch, Ph.D.
My interdisciplinary research focuses on artistic and philosophical approaches to understanding and confronting climate change and environmental injustice. My first book project focuses on how performance shapes ecologically significant relationships in the contemporary Arctic, with a focus on Nunavut, Canada. Perhaps this gathering of topics and methods sounds unconventional, but it sometimes feels inevitable to me; I’ll share a bit about my path in getting here to show you what I mean.
I was born in Tucson, Arizona, within the magnificent Sonoran Desert, where my connection to art, science, and public service began with my parents’ example. My father worked at a public library, a radio station, and at a store specialized in buying and selling work by Native American artists throughout the Southwest. He taught me the importance of arts infrastructure and public institutions to maintaining community, awareness of settler colonial and Native American histories, and esteem for Indigenous artists. My mother worked as a public high school teacher, offering courses in biology, environmental science, and an especially inspired introduction to scientific research methods. She taught me to appreciate the complex, creative, iterative experience of conducting original research and to learn from our vibrant other-than-human neighbors. Altogether, my upbringing instilled in me sensitivity to environmental harm across diverse communities, curiosity about the creative processes of art and science, and a dedication to education and public engagement in the pursuit of beauty and better understanding.
I majored in biology as an undergrad, where I studied botany and ecology at La Selva research station in Costa Rica and wildlife conservation and political ecology throughout Tanzania. Studying abroad, I became fascinated by the complex political and economic dimensions of institutionalized science, and critical of the entrenchment and export of dominate cultural and ideological norms in some natural science research. At the same time, I saw collaborations by diverse people motivated to learn with and respect the environment, an abundance of ways of developing, representing, and responding to environmental knowledges.
Yet time in labs and field research left me discouraged by the capacity of the natural sciences alone to address the mounting crises related to climate change (crises diligently documented in many ecological studies I encountered). So, I turned towards the performing arts; the theatre is where I’d had the most emotionally and philosophically transformative experiences of my life, whether as an audience member, actor, and theatre-maker. I worked for a couple of years in professional theatres and then returned to graduate school where I got a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies.
I was drawn to graduate school with a few guiding questions: why has so little been done to address the climate crisis, and how can the arts intervene and support people in caring about, investigating, and responding to socio-environmental issues? I am interested in approaching these questions through regionally specific contexts. While climate change is a global phenomenon, its causes and consequences are highly uneven in their distribution, and I believe that just and sustainable transitions can best be made through historically, culturally, and ecologically grounded research and organizing. In climatological terms, I focus first on the “mesoscale” (rather than micro- or macro- scale) and its connective roles in private and social becoming.
My first book focuses on the Canadian Far North and the icescapes that constellate physical and imagined environmental relationships there. I first visited the northern, predominately Inuit territory of Nunavut as a teenager, and discovered a great affinity for the region and people I met there. While the Arctic Tundra and the Sonoran Desert might sound like opposites, they are both (historically) low-precipitation environments subject to temperature extremes. Relatedly, they are often popularly misunderstood as barren wildernesses and uninhabited frontiers awaiting human control; these projections, enacted in popular performances and media, support ongoing efforts by colonial governments and capitalist corporations to overtake and exploit these geographies. Living within the tundra or the desert, however, ideas of barrenness and emptiness are untenable. The tundra and the desert are inescapably social places with complex human histories. One also becomes highly attuned to the vibrant lives that are overlooked in conventional landscape representations, the insects, animals, and low-lying plants that team throughout these regions, supported by the underground workings of water aquifers or permafrost. It is with great affection and devotion to these places, places that are undergoing rapid transformations in the context of climate change, that I do my scholarly and public humanities (or postcritical) work. I’m grateful to continue thinking with and amplifying diverse, often marginalized creative perspectives about what ecologies mean, how they matter, and what roles humans ought to take within them in a time of widespread precariousness and possibility.
I’ve had opportunities to work with others committed to thinking beyond received epistemological boundaries in and beyond academia. This includes colleagues at the wonderful Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies at UCLA and Vanderbilt’s Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program. Here at Vanderbilt, I’ve had the pleasure of contributing to panels and public events related to the Eco-Grief Initiative, a production of original plays focused on the emotional and psychological dimensions of ecological crisis, and to the Vanderbilt Museum of Art’s multi-media exhibition “…no footprints, even.” in which artist Jessica Houston used art-as-research and more-than-human collaborations to approach the dynamic Antarctic. I’ve enjoyed engaging with the collaborative, innovative work of the Climate and Environmental Studies Program, the Communication of Science and Technology Program, and the English Department, where I’ve had the opportunity to offer introductions to art and science communication and to performance studies. I’ve enjoyed Vanderbilt’s interdisciplinary spirit and am grateful for the opportunity to develop my work here.