Hope in Creation
Event details
(Please note this is a two day event, you need to be able to attend on both days)
Context
At times, the future can feel overwhelming. As we face escalating environmental crises, fear is often used to motivate action—but can hope offer a more powerful path forward?
Join us for a two-day interdisciplinary workshop at the University of York (30 June – 1 July) exploring how hope can be harnessed through creative methods to communicate environmental research in more inspiring and transformative ways.
Bringing together academics, writers, artists, educators, and performers, this event invites participants to reflect on how creative, hopeful approaches can nurture realistic, yet aspirational visions for life on a hotter, stormier, wetter, and drier planet.
Through storytelling, performance, visual arts, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, we will examine how hopeful narratives can support education, mental health, and action towards more just and sustainable futures.
Who should attend?
Researchers, artists, educators, creatives, and anyone interested in environmental storytelling, climate hope, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Key themes include:
- Creative communication of environmental research
- Hope as a driver for transformation
- Interdisciplinary co-creation and future-building
- Positive narratives for climate resilience
This is a free, in-person event. Spaces are limited, so early registration is advised.
We look forward to imagining a different Earth—together.
Biographies
Dr Julia Bentz is a researcher at ce3c Center for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Change, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has a background in interdisciplinary social sciences and conducts research on transformation and regeneration. Her special interests are transdisciplinary community engagement and learning with a focus on the potential of art and story.
Nic Fife is a printmaker and community organiser whose work is focused on hopeful futures. Their work is socially and politically engaged, summoning joy and tenderness through bold, symbolic imagery. They are currently artist in residence at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and work as a print technician at Thin Ice Press.
Dr Cath Heinemeyer is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Senior Researcher in Ecological Justice at York St John University, where she co-leads the university’s Living Lab, a network of staff and students collaborating on community climate solutions. She has written extensively on the role of dialogic storytelling in the climate crisis, and performs (with Adderstone) original music-infused storytelling
performances that resonate with it.
Dr Tom Houlton is a lecturer in film and literature at the University of York, specialising in modern and contemporary LGBTQ+ film and visual culture. His book, Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects, was published by Routledge in 2021, and he has forthcoming publications on Australian horror movie Wake in Fright (1971), and LGBTQ+ monuments in the 21st century.
Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani is an art historian, researcher and curator. Her research focuses on the relationship between ethics and images, as well as representations of violence. She is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the School of The Arts, York St John University. Since 2022, she co-organises the Visual Ethics Network (Centre for Modern Studies Research Strand, University of York), and, since 2023, the Found Words Experimental Workshops comprising various creative workshops with blackout poetry as a method of close reading of critical theory.
Dr Christopher Lyon has a PhD in Geography and is currently a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and a member of the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York. His broad range of work covers the social dimensions of environmental change. Building a widely covered paper in Global Change Biology, his research explores questions of living and thriving human communities on a hotter Earth with a very different biogeography to today to understand what adaptation and habitability mean under climate and land use change that incorporated artistic works by James McKay. He is a co-investigator
on the YESI-funding projects Artivism in Southeast Asia and Hope in Creation.
As a geologist, teacher and catalyst academic, Dr Smriti Safaya has grasped that the best place to learn is 'where the action is'. She uses experiential, place- and inquiry-based pedagogies with a 'local hook and global outlook' for teaching and learning about sustainability across geographies, cultures and ages.
Dr Peter Sands is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York working on ecological thinking and technoculture. He has co-edited Animality and Horror Cinema (Palgrave 2025) and ‘The Art and Science of Species Revival’ (forthcoming in Configurations).
Dr Sophie Weeks is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the seventeenth-century origins of the modern mastery of nature goal, including the pivotal role of hope as a driving force in motivating radical changes in human thought and action.
Creative Sessions
Photovoice
Workshop facilitator: Julia Bentz
In this creative session we will explore our personal perspectives on hope through photovoice. Participants are invited to bring a photo (taken by them prior to the event) illustrating what hope means to them personally. Looking at the photos, sharing stories and reflections we shed light on the many practices – big and small – that cultivate hope in us and around us.
Photovoice is a creative method that enables participants to document and reflect on their experiences, perceptions, and community issues by taking photographs of their daily lives and environments. Originally developed for community-based participatory research, it can empower people to communicate their perspectives visually, rather than relying solely on verbal or written expression.
Hopeful Zines
Workshop facilitator: Nic Fife
In this session, participants will be invited to make one or more hopeful zines as a reflection on the rest of the conference. Zines (rhymes with ‘seen’ not ‘wine’) are a broad and accessible medium with roots in various DIY subcultures and even further back to early modern chapbooks. Through drawing, collage, or any other way participants would like to make marks on a page, we will make small booklets containing individual and collective reflections on hope. Zine making is an opportunity to weave a short narrative and turn it into something tangible, personal, and playful. This practise also invites makers to discuss questions around self-
publishing and the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Working with True Stories of Community Resilience
Workshop facilitator: Dr Cath Heinemeyer
Amidst the lurching dance of fatalism, fear and fury that characterises this phase of the climate crisis, one steady tap root of hope is often at risk of being ignored: the true, everyday stories of communities collaborating on practical climate solutions. Often these are about building resilience in vulnerable human and nonhuman communities to enable them to adapt to changing ecosystems: grassroots approaches to food, biodiversity, coping with extreme weather, water issues, that draw on traditional knowledge as much as innovative technologies.
In this workshop we will work with these stories, alongside The Tiddy Mun, a strange Lincolnshire folktale of catastrophic ecological change. It’s a story which resonates with the Vale of York landscape in which we will be meeting. Stories, as Ursula Leguin said, can be containers, gourds for our ideas. Within the container of this legend we will imagine possible futures for this particular plain, and write into them to see what we discover.
Blackout Poetry: Hopeless-to-Hopeful Textual Transformations
Workshop facilitator: Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani
For this creative workshop, we will use Blackout Poetry as a method that allows us to transform hopeless texts into narratives of hope. We will engage with extracts from various types of written material – scholarly sources, activist, environmental campaigning or news reports – which all share a common theme: they revolve around negative human experiences of environmental crises, such as eco-anxiety or the threat of extinction. How can we use our creativity to rework these texts into hopeful readings? What might it mean to do so? And how can we think of our environmental ethics when transforming these narratives?
The workshop will begin with a brief introduction by Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, which will contextualise those questions and present Blackout Poetry as a method that can allow us to re-read/re-write hopeless narratives. This draws from a longer project with blackout poetry – Found Words Experimental Workshops ( and IG: @f.w.e.w_) – that Kyveli has been co-organising since 2023 in a collaboration between the University of York, York St John University and the University of Thessaly (GR). Each participant will receive copies of short extracts, which we will have a communal reading of, before we start reworking them with various art material. We will conclude the workshop by sharing our hopeful narratives with the other members of the group, in order to rethink how we can build environmental futures that could be planted with seeds of hope.
Provisional Schedule
Day 1: 30 June 2025
10:00 - 10:15 Welcoming and Introduction (Julia Bentz and Sophie Weeks)
10:20 - 10:30 Hope in the Past (Sophie Weeks)
10:30 - 10:40 Hope in the Future (Peter Sands)
10:40 - 10:50 Hope in a Hotter Planet (Christopher Lyon)
10:50 - 11:05 Coffee Break
11:05 - 11:15 On the Ethics of Hope(less) photographs (Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani)
11:15 - 11:25 Queer Hope (Tom Houlton)
11:25 - 11:35 Hope in Action (Smriti Safaya)
11:35 - 13:00 World Café: Hope throughout Time
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Creative session 1:
Blackout Poetry: Hopeless-to-Hopeful Textual Transformations (Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani)
(coffee available)
Day 2: 01 July 2025
10:00 - 10:45 Creative Session 2: Photovoice (Julia Bentz)
10:45 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 13:00 Creative session 3:
Working with True Stories of Community Resilience (Cath Heinemeyer)
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Creative session 4: Hopeful Zines (Nic Fife)
(coffee available)
16:00 - 16:45 Gallery walk and Closing (Julia Bentz)