What is the responsibility, or the task of the arts as we face environmental crisis?
Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities. Ecologies in Practice identifies the arts as an important mode of inquiry for reimagining, and for public engagement and understanding of pressing environmental and social concerns, while acknowledging the ways in which it contributes important work to the growing interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.
Bringing together artistic perspectives from a range of lenses and voices, including artists, writers, scholars, activists, curators, theorists, and makers, Ecologies in Practice offers important tools for artists, scholars, students, and research-creators invested in arts and the environment. Contributors present artistic methods as alternative sites of understanding that contribute significant and affective work to environmental scholarship, while thinking outside of the disciplinary borders and confines of the artworld. Ecologies in Practice aims to initiate vital conversations among practitioners, and together with readers, consider what environmentally engaged arts lend differently to these conversations.

Elysia French is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University. French is trained as an art historian and studies contemporary art and the environment, with an interest in the visual culture of oil, climate change, and multispecies relationships.

Elysia French's profile page

Amanda White (she/her) is a white settler artist/scholar currently living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Art at Western University. Her current work and research is focused on plants, food, and environmental justice. amandawhite.com

Amanda White's profile page

Emma Morgan-Thorp's profile page

Ecologies in Practice offers an adventurous foray into the current state of environmentally engaged arts in Canada. Its wide-ranging explorations of media and artistic practices will appeal to practitioners working in studio, in situ, and gallery settings, as well as those who research and teach in environmental humanities. The contributors add new layers to a rich existing lineage of arts-based environmental inquiry in Canada and engage with questions fundamental to understanding ourselves as stubbornly creative, cultural, and ecological beings. We need the contributions of artists of all stripes to help us imagine anew in the uneasy times to come, and this volume helps guide the way.”

Jenny Kerber, Wilfrid Laurier University, author of Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally