Sounds of Nature

Welsh Energy Humanities
‘Mapping Welsh Energy Humanities’ brings together over thirteen researchers from seven universities – with other partners from the local government, heritage, and private, sectors – to consider the role played by multiple forms of energy (coal, oil, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, tidal and biomass) in forming the social and cultural identity of Wales over the last two hundred years. The project explores the shifting significance of these varied energy sources upon the Welsh cultural imagination both during and particularly after the era of coal. From the sinking of the first deep pits in the Rhondda in the 1850s through to the 1950s, Wales played an important role in the global coal economy. However, by the late 1940s, production in the South Wales coalfields had gone into terminal decline, and during the 1960s Wales began to expand and diversify its energy sources: initially, oil and nuclear power; more recently, renewables such as wind, solar, tidal, and biomass. Drawing extensively on the historical archive, and incorporating the visual arts, literature and music, the project will begin to answer the question ‘What role has energy played in Wales?’ and better understand how having this answer can help us to a more sustainable energy future.

Covid Futures
In this project we focused on a new corpus of pandemic-inspired predictions of our global shared future. Covid-19 and the resulting pandemic offered a fertile arena for prediction, refocusing attention on the limits of humanity and how societies should manage the long term at a moment of considerable uncertainty. Across a wide range of media, which included news articles, opinion pieces, blogs, social media, and creative outputs, commentators in the first two waves speculated on life after the pandemic. Those making these predictions seized on the collective sense of crisis to present narratives that reveal a complex layering of different interpretations. These are overdetermined by varying social, political, economic, or ideological positions. What the future might hold was core to our analysis. Specifically, the corpus revealed the centrality of climate, the environment, and the workplace to those who were offering a perspective on what the post-pandemic future might or should hold. These were themes we interrogated in detail here; first with a wider lens to explore Covid-19 and the global environment and economy, and then through a narrowing of focus to investigate predictions based around the urban workplace as an environment and site of capitalist response. Our project showed how narratives compete with one another to take control of the post-pandemic future. While there is a great deal of emerging scholarship focussed directly on Covid-19 and the pandemic, our intervention offered a new understanding of how the future beyond Covid-19 was understood.

Sharing Best Practice in Science
In 2018, the researchers of the Cardiff ScienceHumanities Initiative undertook a series of qualitative interviews with principal investigators and co-investigators of projects explicitly self-identifying as collaborations between the humanities, social sciences and sciences (including medicine). The projects were all based in the UK. Read more about our findings here.

Off Sick
The Off Sick Project considered the role of narrative in understandings of illness both in the past and the present. It incorporated historical and literary research with present-day stories of illness gathered from the communities of South Wales.