Weather Mobilities Spring School

Open-weather collaborated with PhD researcher Maddie Joyce in a ‘Weathering mobilities’ spring school at Royal Holloway University’s Department of Geography. Open-weather and Maddie led a hands-on demonstration and a group discussion on moving bodies, earth-sensing infrastructures and weathering.

The Spring School invited post-graduate and early career researchers to participate in two days of discussion, experimentation, listening, reading, sensing and writing around (im)mobilities (of people, wildlife, satellites, water, and other materials) and ‘weathering’, at Royal Holloway University of London. The School used ‘weathering’ to consider how lives are exposed, eroded and depleted by weather, and how lives also live-with, adapt, and respond to climate, its variations and material and elemental conditions. It equally acknowledged that those weathers, as Sharpe (2016) and others recognise, are as entangled with the wider atmospheres of ‘colonialism, racism, sexism’ and other forces that ‘are weather’ too (Engelmann and Dyer 2020). The School explored how weathering or weathered (im)mobilities might be sensed and made palpable in assemblages of bodies and machines, and expressed and articulated in a multitude of practices, such as in writing, walking, photography, and other artistic and creative practices.