NCACE’s Evidence Café sessions have been held bi-monthly since March 2021. The Café is an online space for presentations, evidence and information sharing, story-telling as well as a community of knowledge sharing and exchange.

Each session has a loose theme and the focus for January’s Café will be on Climate Emergency and Environmental Humanities. We intend to build on urgent conversations emerging from climate policy - such as the recent COP26 conference - and the ways in which an arts and humanities perspective can help us to understand these issues. This session provides a platform for our cross-sector audiences to shine a light on how partners from HE and the arts and culture sector are collaborating to respond to climate-related issues using creative and innovative practice. This session also relates to and generates evidence around one of our four core NCACE themes: environment and climate change.

Our contributors include: Dr. Samantha Walton, Dr. Astrid Breel and Dr. Penny Hay (Bath Spa University), who will discuss their work on the environmental humanities and climate-focused collaborations, including the Forest of Imagination project. Tom Cahill-Jones (Partnerships Manager, Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre) will also join us to discuss the new sustainability collaborations ongoing at the centre.

Alongside presentations from various speakers, there will be plenty of opportunity for group input. We are particularly interested in hearing from our attendees, so please do share any evidence you may have on your own climate-related collaborations to share either before, during or after the session.

This Evidence Café will be co-hosted by Evelyn Wilson, Emily Hopkins and Anja Rekeszus. Bring your tea, your notebook and as many ideas as you want.

NCACE is a new initiative led by TCCE and funded by Research England to facilitate and support capacity for Knowledge Exchange between Higher Education and the arts and cultural sector across the UK, with a particular focus on evidencing and showcasing the social, cultural, environmental, as well as economic, impacts of such activities.

NCACE Evidence Café is part of our wider Evidence Hub activities which creates spaces and brings together resources to help us to better document the scale, extent, nature and drivers of knowledge exchange collaborations between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the arts and cultural sector.