COCE 2025 Program

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Katie Hunt This panel will discuss an ongoing collaboration on training students to shift their understanding of environmental narratives and science to create opportunities for creativity and inclusion. For the last three years, students from the University of Nevada, Reno have travelled to Sri Lanka to study Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) around the edges of the Mahaweli Project. Prior to their fieldwork in Sri Lanka, students took a writing class, from Dr. Ludden, where they produced a proposal and read research on elephants, scholarship on Sri Lankan history, and decolonial theory. While in Sri Lanka, students meet with faculty from the University of Colombo, Dr. Perera, and the University of Peradeniya, Dr. Kalugampitiya, among others. These conversations with students and faculty became an inflection point in the student experience: this panel will discuss these workshops and their pedagogy. On this panel, Ludden, Perera, and Kalugampitiya will provide their own perspectives on working with the students and how their pedagogy and practice of engaging with students created conviviality and provided opportunities for them to shift their views. The panel will look at three major themes for training students in environmental communication: genre, ethos, and place.

Virtual Sessions

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Emma Francis Bloomfield This panel will share case studies of community-engaged environmental research guided by a common framework of narratives and storytelling, especially counternarratives from marginalized groups, or groups “from the edge.” From analyzing competing narratives around sustainability to helping marginalized communities tell their stories, the panel considers narratives as obstacles, opportunities, methods, and tools for imagining and building more sustainable futures and community partnerships. As we consider how to live convivially and creatively in harmony with more-than-human nature, we must turn to placed-based and local knowledges that communities hold to counter, challenge, and expand on official, institutionalized narratives.

Virtual Sessions

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Katie Hunt This interactive workshop explores the intersections of story, climate, and renewable energy, and creativity. The workshop will draw on practices applied during the making of the facilitator’s feature documentary, “How To Power A City,” a feature film exploring solar- and wind-power projects in six U.S. and Puerto Rico locations. The film is the only documentary featuring community-led projects and BIPOC and women leaders. Its narrative follows a “solutions journalism” approach by looking at how each community used solar or wind power to address a broader challenge. The workshop look at polarizing stereotypes and how they are perpetuated, and address misinformation and disinformation by turning to accurate stories, lived experiences, and small-size, high-impact projects. Participants will practice transforming perspectives to find narratives that resonate with them.

Virtual Sessions

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Ella Muncie This session will feature a small panel of recent graduates and practitioners who will share their professional journeys, as well as insights and advice from their current jobs. This will be a casual space and conversation to gain tips and tricks about research, the job market, different career pathways, extra opportunities, and how to design a standout CV. Graduate student/early career COCE participants are encouraged to attend this session and connect with a new support network.

Virtual Sessions

Emcee Dr. Gabi Mocatta (IECA Chair) with Honouring Country delivered by Sarah Wilcox, welcome by Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds, and keynote address by Hannah Maloney.

Hybrid Sessions

Chair: Tania Leimbach This session provides a variety of practices around telling environmental stories, from quilts, to oral traditions, to curriculum development.

(Chair: Joshua Zeunert)

This will be a participatory and collaborative workshop in which participants will work together to begin to co-design a game to enable players to identify preferred futures in a climate changed world, and pathways for resolving conflicting interests within this imagined world.My Australian Research Council DECRA project (beginning April 2025) aims to reinvigorate democratic engagement in climate adaptation by enabling citizens to set the agenda for collective, inclusive, and transformative adaptation decision-making. Building on the emerging field of deliberative play (a social and fun practice for exploring alternatives and making judgements) (Craig, 2023) and serious gaming (the use of games for learning or behaviour change) (Flood et al., 2018) I plan to develop and test innovative methods to engage and empower diverse voices in democratic dialogue with government decision-makers.An early stage of this research involves exploring different ways to engage citizens in game co-design processes. I plan to use the COCE workshop to test out an approach to co-designing a game using ‘ideation cards’ similar to those designed by Tahir and Wang (2020).Current failures of democratic process can be seen as a crisis of communication, reflecting the absence of political norms such as listening, consideration and justification, that enable the participation of diverse publics in political decision-making (Dryzek, 2005).

The workshop will start with an overview of visual communication methods, the use of cartoons and comics for environmental communication with reference to the work of those practicing in this area (Rohan Chakravarty's 'Green Humour', Rosemary Mosco and local cartoonist Jess Harwood amongst others), audience engagement, and how the use or distribution of comic art impacts the form / script and format of the work. We will also look at some examples of environmental impact through comics on environmental subject matter. This workshop will have creative and interactive elements to explore this subject matter. As part of this workshop, participants will also be prompted to turn an environmental communication problem into a series of six comic panels, suggesting script and visual communication devices for engagement and understanding. Participants will be prompted to think creatively about imagery and copy, encouraged to draw, consider comic artists they could collaborate with in their community, and think about distribution strategies for maximum reach.

*SESSION CANCELLED DUE TO UNEXPECTED EXIGENCY. If presenters are able to reschedule, COCE organizers will update attendees. This is a hybrid session. Zoom Moderator: Katie Hunt Participants will be provided with a comic strip worksheet (either in paper format or digital), which has been laid out around a “before” and “after” structure with a central “turning point” event separating the two columns. We will ask the participants to engage with a “story completion” method, which leaves the work open to invention of the participants’ creative autonomy and freedom of response (Clarke et al., 2017). This means that we will use an ambiguous story stem, in order to allow as much creative freedom and imagination from participants as possible. In this creative freedom, we hope to open the possibility for “socially undesirable” (ibid) narratives which would otherwise be excluded from public discourse.

Hybrid Sessions

Chair: Dara Wald

(Chair: Gabi Mocatta)

Chair: Awni Etaywe

(Chair: Kerrie Foxwell-Norton)

Chair: Mariko Thomas In this session, artists involved in the conference will give six-eight minute, high-density overviews of their practice and how those practices connect to the conference theme. Artists are encouraged to use lots of visuals!

(Chair: Casey R. Schmitt)

(Chair: Lawrie Zion)

(Chair: Joanna Krajewski)

(Chair: Pauline Marsh)

(Chair: Deborah Wise)

Chair: Bruno Takahashi

(Chair: Jane Rawson)

(Chair: Rebecca Nally)

(Chair: Ann Jabro)

Enjoy the fire pits and grab a bite and a beverage. Food and drinks will be available until close. Hobart Brewing is located at 16 Evans St, Hobart

Taking place at Hobart Brewing Company for part of our Convivial Night, this interactive panel, using evidence-based approaches, will explore how we can acknowledge the myriad feelings associated with climate and eco distress, and support ourselves and others, in ways that facilitate action and minimise overwhelm.

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Katie Hunt

Virtual Sessions

This is a fully virtual session, participation in this session is limited to 12. Zoom Moderator: Emily Montgomerie This interactive workshop is dedicated to the discovery of participants’ conceptualization of ‘biodiversity’, and a discussion of practical implications arising from them when communicating during collaborative efforts. Particularly, we focus on challenges faced by individuals communicating environmental issues at the policy level. Participants will both relate their own experiences, and learn how these compare with challenges described in literature. Finally, we ask how these challenges could be met, addressing recommendations for effective communication that have been made in the literature, and together discussing their applicability to the case of biodiversity conservation. Note: If you are planning to attend this workshop, the organizers kindly invite you to complete a short pre-workshop questionnaire to help tailor the session.

Virtual Sessions

This is a fully virtual session. Zoom Moderator: Steve Depoe

Virtual Sessions