Jen Rae
Dr Jen Rae is a Narrm (Melbourne)-based artist-researcher of Canadian Métis-Scottish descent. Her 15-year practice-led research expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. It is centered around cultural responses to climate change, specifically the role of artists. Her work is engaged in discourses around food in/security, disaster preparedness and speculative futures predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies and community alliances. Jen is a core artist of Arts House’s 5-year REFUGE project, where art meets the climate emergency. REFUGE brings together artists, Indigenous elders, emergency service providers, academics, local government and communities to rehearse climate related disaster scenarios and to explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness.
Jen is the Director and Creative Lead of Fair Share Fare – where art, performance, disaster preparedness and cookery collide into positive disruption. Fair Share Fare orchestrates interactive and cooperative works that act as data generators and community builders to support future food security and help decolonise thinking around food provenance and sovereignty. Jen is a board member of the Australian Creative Recovery Network and the International Environmental Communication Association; and, has lectured at the post-graduate level in socially-engaged art and performance at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University.
Recent publications include, Creating into the Future: Speculative Practice across Borders, Disciplines, and Knowledges (Canadian Theatre Review, 179, summer 2019, doi:10.3138/ctr.179.003) and Recipe for Disaster (Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly, 19 (4)).
Contact:
E: jen@jenraeis.com
www.jenraeis.com
www.centreforreworlding.com
Jen is the Director and Creative Lead of Fair Share Fare – where art, performance, disaster preparedness and cookery collide into positive disruption. Fair Share Fare orchestrates interactive and cooperative works that act as data generators and community builders to support future food security and help decolonise thinking around food provenance and sovereignty. Jen is a board member of the Australian Creative Recovery Network and the International Environmental Communication Association; and, has lectured at the post-graduate level in socially-engaged art and performance at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University.
Recent publications include, Creating into the Future: Speculative Practice across Borders, Disciplines, and Knowledges (Canadian Theatre Review, 179, summer 2019, doi:10.3138/ctr.179.003) and Recipe for Disaster (Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly, 19 (4)).
Contact:
E: jen@jenraeis.com
www.jenraeis.com
www.centreforreworlding.com
less
InterestsView All (21)
Uploads
Papers by Jen Rae
risk reduction, and resilience within the climate emergency context. Our practice centres First Nations knowledge systems and protocols, where time and compounding existential crises converge to delve into moral dilemmas of life and death, and where we hone in on themes of child-centred trauma prevention and intergenerational justice in the coming collapse. Speculative futuring is a way of decoupling from maladaptive ways of engaging/
disengaging with the climate emergency context to reorganize our relational thinking and being.
Eds. David Pledger and Nikos Papastergiadis
Gallery, University of Melbourne in the South Lawn Car Park, 15 August
2019, as part of DISPOSABLE.
In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up becomes increasingly culturally diverse and, in many respects, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) has come to be viewed as a model of cultural tolerance and a forum for debate about race and diversity. In a short space of time Australian routines have extended well beyond the old colonial targets of Europe and America, and indigenous comics have well established platforms.
Muslim communities have been less well represented but this is fast changing. Wil Anderson, comedy flavour of the month, devoted much of his sell-out 2016 standup show to discoursing on racism in Australia. Suren Jayamenne, Nazeem Hussein and Khaled Khalafalla demonstrate a new second-generation self-confidence among Muslim comics and test the boundaries of a new sense of Australian identity and nationhood. For Hussein stand-up comedians are ‘superheroes’ because ‘laughter is an evolutionary defence mechanism and comedy protects us from the harshness of the world around us.’ Hussein’s current routines focus on hysteria from a minority in Bendigo, who are convinced that the construction of a mosque amounts to ‘a Muslim invasion of Victoria.’ Hussein’s strategy is to satirise the media hype and expose ‘nonsensical racism’. What is interesting is that Hussein’s outspokenness in a debate that Australian political parties largely shun, has met with significant public support. This essay examines the ways in which stand-ups focusing on cultural diversity are transforming both the MICF and having an impact in terms of cultural and political debate in the media. A range of ethnically engaged stand-ups is now identified as belonging to Australian theatre’s most activist performers.
Thesis Chapters by Jen Rae
exchange.
The aim of this research is to underscore some of the opportunities for artists to engage as interlocutors and mediators within the network of environmental communication. Accordingly, the research examines some of the historical precedents of environmental art and how contemporary artists approach both local and global environmental issues.
The research offers new knowledge in two ways. First, in the processes of response and communication in the production of public artworks, which explore local issues such as water protection and security, to large-scale drawings that address broader ecological issues influencing global climate change. And, secondly in the exegesis, where the findings of process-based art production and contextual research contribute to the field of environmental art discourse. It also offers methods of approach for artists and science communicators to work together in addressing some of the greatest environmental challenges of the Anthropocene.
Talks by Jen Rae
Books by Jen Rae
Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored.
In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways.
In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?
risk reduction, and resilience within the climate emergency context. Our practice centres First Nations knowledge systems and protocols, where time and compounding existential crises converge to delve into moral dilemmas of life and death, and where we hone in on themes of child-centred trauma prevention and intergenerational justice in the coming collapse. Speculative futuring is a way of decoupling from maladaptive ways of engaging/
disengaging with the climate emergency context to reorganize our relational thinking and being.
Eds. David Pledger and Nikos Papastergiadis
Gallery, University of Melbourne in the South Lawn Car Park, 15 August
2019, as part of DISPOSABLE.
In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up becomes increasingly culturally diverse and, in many respects, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) has come to be viewed as a model of cultural tolerance and a forum for debate about race and diversity. In a short space of time Australian routines have extended well beyond the old colonial targets of Europe and America, and indigenous comics have well established platforms.
Muslim communities have been less well represented but this is fast changing. Wil Anderson, comedy flavour of the month, devoted much of his sell-out 2016 standup show to discoursing on racism in Australia. Suren Jayamenne, Nazeem Hussein and Khaled Khalafalla demonstrate a new second-generation self-confidence among Muslim comics and test the boundaries of a new sense of Australian identity and nationhood. For Hussein stand-up comedians are ‘superheroes’ because ‘laughter is an evolutionary defence mechanism and comedy protects us from the harshness of the world around us.’ Hussein’s current routines focus on hysteria from a minority in Bendigo, who are convinced that the construction of a mosque amounts to ‘a Muslim invasion of Victoria.’ Hussein’s strategy is to satirise the media hype and expose ‘nonsensical racism’. What is interesting is that Hussein’s outspokenness in a debate that Australian political parties largely shun, has met with significant public support. This essay examines the ways in which stand-ups focusing on cultural diversity are transforming both the MICF and having an impact in terms of cultural and political debate in the media. A range of ethnically engaged stand-ups is now identified as belonging to Australian theatre’s most activist performers.
exchange.
The aim of this research is to underscore some of the opportunities for artists to engage as interlocutors and mediators within the network of environmental communication. Accordingly, the research examines some of the historical precedents of environmental art and how contemporary artists approach both local and global environmental issues.
The research offers new knowledge in two ways. First, in the processes of response and communication in the production of public artworks, which explore local issues such as water protection and security, to large-scale drawings that address broader ecological issues influencing global climate change. And, secondly in the exegesis, where the findings of process-based art production and contextual research contribute to the field of environmental art discourse. It also offers methods of approach for artists and science communicators to work together in addressing some of the greatest environmental challenges of the Anthropocene.
Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored.
In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways.
In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?