Towards a Wind Humanities

In this talk, Dr J. R. Carpenter and Dr Richard Carter will discuss their interdisciplinary practice-led research projects published in a special issue of Media + Environment co-edited by Maximilian Hepach, Ryan Bishop, J. R. Carpenter, Jussi Parikka, Birgit Schneider during the AHRC and DFG funded project Weather Reports: Wind as Model, Media, and Experience. The research presented in this issue introduces wind humanities as a burgeoning field, exploring how wind shapes experience, reasoning, artistic and knowledge production. It positions wind as a medium, model, and lived experience, drawing on environmental humanities, media studies, and artistic practice to investigate wind’s methodological, epistemological, and ontological implications for humanistic inquiry. The authors situate this emergent field within the broader environmental and elemental turn in the humanities and media studies, highlighting its connections to new materialism and its potential to transform our understanding of both wind and the elemental more broadly. They suggest a rich and evolving landscape of inquiry around wind, highlighting past work and introducing the ten contributions to this stream, which explore wind as media, model, and experience across military technology, volumetric poetry, a libretto, animacies, aesthetics, diffraction, environmental perception, risk communication, indigenous cosmologies, and energy infrastructure.

Dr J. R. Carpenter is a Lecturer in Creative Practice in Performance Writing in the School of English at the University of Leeds.

Dr. Richard A Carter is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York.

This event is presented by the Royal Meteorological Society.

To attend please register here.