© Universität Bielefeld
Crossover Scholarship and Cultural Creativity in the Americas
Urban Ecopoetics: Photography, Poetry, and Science in Dialog
Urban Ecopoetics: Photography, Poetry, and Science in Dialog (CALAS-BMBF, Laboratorio 3, 2023)
It would be presumptuous to claim that art and literature are panaceas for the planet's threatened biodiversity, ever-warming earth, and endangered oceans and forests. But art and literature can certainly chart ways in which we can think of seemingly separate things in a coherent, interacting, and mutually protective way. Hence, this crossover scholarship project including photography and poetry proposes an alternative approach to the relations between art, nature, and urban culture. Turning research about the anthropocene into an artistic way of thinking ecocentrically rather than anthropocentrically, this project envisions new ways of reflecting and connecting nature and culture in an urban context. While the images and poems, to different degrees, try to break down the boundaries between art, nature, the urban, and the human, they also reveal the complexity and perhaps utopian desire of what it means to radically leave behind an anthropocentric view. After all, there is a human eye behind the photographs and a human mind behind the poems. The project includes a photo exhibit to be presented in the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales at the Centro Cultural Universitario de la Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG) during the FIL de Guadalajara 2023 and a book publication to follow. This project led by Wilfried Raussert, award-winning photographer and author, is conducted in collaboration with Ann Fisher-Wirth, award-winning poet and environmental studies scholar, the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales at the Centro Cultural Universitario de la Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG), and the CALAS-CUCSH UdeG office.
Routes of Reggae
Routes of Reggae, a film and research project by Afua Cooper & Wilfried Raussert (2022-2024; funded by the Canadian government [producers and directors]).
Routes of Reggae is a hybrid and participatory documentary film and research project to be produced by Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert. The project is embedded in the overall project A Black People's History of Canada, which is funded by the Canadian government. The film is intended to fill a gap in the historiography of Jamaican/Caribbean migration to Canada and to highlight the importance of reggae and dub as community-building cultural expressions in the Canadian metropolises of Toronto and Montreal since the 1980s. In particular, diaspora communities such as 'Little Jamaica' in Toronto and similar quarters in Montreal will be examined in order to understand the central importance of music in migration processes and diasporic cultural production. In this context, reggae and dub poetry and performance are seen as an expression of a Caribbean way of life that has a lasting impact on life in Canadian metropolises, as an expression of the resilience and resistance of Afro-descendant diaspora communities in Canada, and as an expression of oral historiography in North America.
The film has the objective to create Reggae archives for future generations.
Find out more on: Black History is Canadian History.