AHRC Collaborative Skills Grant awarded for ‘Silent Spring’ project
Research students in the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of York have been awarded an AHRC Collaborative Skills Grant for their project 'Silent Spring: Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment'.
Research students in the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of York have been awarded an AHRC Collaborative Skills Grant for their project ‘Silent Spring: Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment’, which uses Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to explore the relationship between arts and science research through two workshops in 2013.
Rachel Carson’s classic polemic Silent Spring celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012: it still stands as one of the most influential texts on the damage caused to the natural environment by chemicals and nuclear fallout in the twentieth century. Taking Carson’s book as its starting point, this interdisciplinary post-graduate project aims to explore how a growing awareness of the biological, chemical and technological changes to the environment has shaped cultural explorations of nature and landscape in the post-1945 period, through visual art, literature and film. It will consider both how scientists have used images and texts to communicate their ideas to the public, and how artists have responded to, used, and resisted scientific developments in their work.
Two workshops at York and Birkbeck in 2013 will start unpacking some of the complications inherent in the use of terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘environment’, and the associations embedded in them.
The AHRC’s new student-led Collaborative Skills Development Grants support doctoral students to establish and run smaller-scale collaborative programmes.
The Silent Spring project is offering travel bursaries for postgraduate students and early career researchers to attend. You can find out more about these bursaries and how to apply here.