A Conversation about the Weather

Increasingly, other-than-scientific questions and creative expressions of climate change are gaining ground as legitimate forms of new knowledge in the fields of feminism, environmental humanities, environmental cultural studies and design studies, of which this piece of work is a part. The work offers a novel contribution to this interdisciplinary scholarship by creatively interpreting the perspectives, experiences and practices of people living with urban heat in Penrith NSW as an imagined conversation between a mother and child. The conversation, which was originally performed as part of the Hacking the Anthropocene II: Weathering Symposium held at University of Sydney in May 2017, connects spoken experiences, memories and aspirations drawn from the Cooling the Commons pilot study with images of the designed environments that shape, powerfully but often tacitly, people's everyday social practices.