A Greener York as the White Rose Forest Grows? Iwan Downey, Alison Dyke, Catherine Heinemeyer and Rachel Nisbet
Event details
How do trees contribute to our sense of place within urban communities? Come along and discover how imagining city treescapes within the White Rose Forest is more than fanciful tree-visioning.
Sifting through citizen stories of treescapes, our panel of speakers - forester Iwan Downey, political-ecologist Alison Dyke, storyteller Catherine Heinemeyer and cultural-ecologist Rachel Hosein Nisbet - animate images of their characteristics and connections to people.
Layering up rooty and broad canopy images harvested from citizens’ stories in three English cities, they will explore how this space-based approach could colour a green-print for York as a White Rose Forest city.
Whether you come just to listen, or also to share a tree tale, all are welcome.
Find out more about citizen stories of treescapes.
About the speakers
Iwan Downey is Programme Manager of the White Rose Forest which works with landowners, farmers and communities to plant trees across North and West Yorkshire, helping to improve our natural environment.
Dr Alison Dyke is a Research Fellow with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). Alison joined SEI in 2011 following over 10 years as an independent research and policy consultant working in the fields of community woodlands and wild harvests. She is a political ecologist working on nature-society relations across a broad range of environmental subject areas: bringing nonhumans into research and decision-making processes in governance of trees and water; and investigating the impact that these relationships have on human and non-human health and well-being.
Dr Catherine Heinemeyer is a Senior Research Associate in Ecological Justice and Senior Lecturer in Arts at York St John University. As a storyteller and researcher, Catherine is interested in the role of storytelling and the arts in ecological justice and other intersecting crises. Her practice-based PhD in storytelling with adolescents built on her extensive experience of artist residencies in educational, mental health, heritage, ecological and community settings. Her current practice-based research collaborations investigate storytelling and climate adaptation, the role of indigenous knowledge in responding to climate crisis and disabled access to 'blue spaces'.
Dr Rachel Hosein Nisbet is a Performance and Cultural Industries Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Rachel’s academic research and practice are guided by the question, how can cultural productions advance equitable, earth-system governance? She addresses it using an interdisciplinary methodology that involves textual close reading; mapping communities of practice relative to ideas of a common good that inspire them, and the comparison of archives produced by these practitioners. Her research is informed by her doctoral training in the earth sciences and the environmental humanities.
Partners
