Renaissance of the Earth

Team
Edie Meidav, Provost Professor, English (PI)
Marjorie Rubright, Associate Professor, English
Director, Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary
Renaissance Studies & Renaissance of the Earth
Evan MacCarthy, Five College Visiting Associate
Professor, Music & Dance
Director, Elements
Lena Fletcher, Chief Undergraduate Advisor &
Senior Lecturer, Natural Resource Conservation

Supported by SPARC Grant, UMass Amherst

Sharing News of a Related Collaborative

Walk&Talk Biennial: 2025 theme GESTURES OF ABUNDANCE
 
The Walk&Talk Biennial is an initiative that promotes a biennial encounter with the arts on the island of São Miguel, Azores, for a collective reflection on the territory, its imaginaries, and transformations. Based on new commissions and collaborative processes, it articulates exhibitions, performances, meetings, walks, and public events involving artists, curators, experts, and local communities.

With a participatory, ecological, and transdisciplinary approach, the Biennial establishes itself as a space for research, advocacy, and encounter, designed by a network of regional and international stakeholders. As its name suggests, it is a biennial in motion—traveling across the island and taking place in different locations and formats. More than an exhibition event, it is a living structure that explores ways of being and doing together.

https://2025.walktalkazores.org/programa/

A project with the University of Azores addressing climate change and sustainability that undertakes a qualitative research project located at the nexus of the environmental sciences and the creative, historical, and literary arts. 

We live in a time of great ecological threat, fragility, and human resolve. “If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Rising seas have created a particular vulnerability within the archipelago of the Azores, in which the average sea-level rise is projected to be from .25 to two meters by the end of this century, resulting in what multiple sources project will make conditions of survival, coastal or inland, at best complex, at worst perilous. Many of the half million Portuguese-Americans living in southern New England claim Azorean heritage.

This team takes as a core mission the importance of intercultural learning, and each team member has been deeply influenced by what we have learned by journeying beyond the islands of our disciplines. Working on Azorean resilience will provide this team a shared expansion of vision, allowing us at a crucial moment in our own history, and that of our planet, to share the best of what we believe to be our university’s core values – namely, interdisciplinary endeavors that address the most difficult issues of our time, cross-cultural learning that builds citizens of the world, and community engagements that enrich educational excellence as well as the communities we reach.

Study Abroad Opportunity