Thursday, 6 March 2025, 18:00 hours
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How can we develop sustainable food systems? Open questions like this call for creative ideas. But training programmes for future professionals in fields like food economics have rarely prioritised creative skills. Anke Strauß is one of the people changing this. At Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, near Berlin, Germany, students in a new bachelor’s programme on cultures of food and farming do learn a lot about topics such as soil quality, value chains, or organic production methods as seen from science and technology. But right in the first semester, they also take a course where they explore artistic approaches under Anke’s guidance.
Anke begins by asking a different kind of question: What is our relationship to other earthly beings? How are we connected to the earth, how do we embody it? As the course progresses, Anke encourages students to engage with philosophical readings as well as experiment with various artistic methods such as research drawings, collage, poetry, or performance while collaborating with several artists. She teaches students to focus on relationships, between themselves and earth others as well as among co-learners in the group. In this relational key, students practise ways to perceive, consume and value food as that which interconnects body and earth.
Anke will talk us through a range of artistic works created by students in her recent course and, drawing on participants’ research diaries, share experiences and insights that occurred in the process. We will discuss Anke’s arts-based teaching concept and what we can learn from its potentials and issues – for training better food and farming managers as well for helping many more of us approach sustainable development as a creative challenge.
About the speaker
Anke Strauß is an academic researcher and teacher working at the intersection of organisation, art, and ecologies. She is particularly curious about alternative ways of organising, aesthetics and affect as organising forces, and their potential for the transformation to sustainability. Anke holds a PhD in critical management and organisation studies and serves as the head of the executive master’s programme on Strategic Sustainability Management at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany, enabling participants to lead the transformation in their organisations. She was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (now RIFS, Potsdam) and led the interdisciplinary art-research project “Working Utopias”, which used utopian thinking to develop sustainable ways of organising work lives: www.working-utopias.com
Host and organisation
Hosted by SERI fellow Philipp P. Thapa. Co-organised by Pro Progressione, Hungary and SERI.
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