Poetry Clinic offers a remedy to cultivate new relationships among readers, poets, and poems in a time of profound uncertainty. It is online platform for poets to engage with readers looking for a poetic response to living, including rituals, losses, and wonder.
एषः कम्पः मां स्थिरं करोति
the shaking keeps me steady
Offerings
Experimental Arts
We work with poets, fiction writers, film makers, musicians and sound artists to develop community-engaged arts practices that respond to individual and collective experiences of uncertainty.
Transformative Education
We design curricula for schools, universities and community garden programming with an emphasis on curating spaces that bring together the arts, ecology and social justice and engage critically with sources of climate anxiety.
Narrative Strategy and Organizational Change
We help design narrative strategy for non-profits, educational organizations and community-based social movement builders. We bring a reflexive, culturally-competent and scientifically-based approach.
Resilience in Crisis
We apply interdisciplinary expertise in mental health to work with diverse populations on resilience building using clinical, literary and research tools. We specialize in approaches that foreground the needs of youth, marginalized communities and migrant populations.
Projects
Arts and Catastrophe
An eco-art zine that brings together work from activists and artists using tarot, mixtape, collage and poetry. Part of a project on socially engaged, political art and practice.
Navigating Uncertainty Workshops
These workshops respond to the overwhelming uncertainty experienced by people at the individual and collective level in the context of the climate crisis and other social and environmental challenges. In collaboration with Vermont State University, this workshop engages with a range of writings from environmental science, neuroscience, poetry and anthropology to examine psychological uncertainty, climate anxiety and other related emotions. It offers tools for working with clients, organizations, and communities experiencing uncertainty with a focus on climate-related distress.
Swamped: What experts do when they no longer know what to do focuses on stories of uncertainty. We speak with disaster responders, scientists, theologians, sanitation workers, poets, teachers, and morticians and others who face overwhelming situations. The show is rooted in the belief that we have a lot to learn from each other when we no longer know what to do. The more we share these stories, the more possibility we have for growing and collectively facing our seismic social and ecological challenges.
About Us
Uncertainty Academy is an experimental space to build relationships and tools that respond to our moment of cascading crises. We nurture collaborations among artists, scholars, educators and activists to understand what it means to live in a human body in a world of surprises and contingencies. Our goal is to cultivate practices that help individuals, organizations and communities across different landscapes to flourish* in a world that often outstrips our ability to predict.
Suparna Choudhury
Suparna Choudhury is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer, positioned between academic and community-based research, as well as experimental arts and healing. She trained in neuroscience, history and philosophy of science and creative writing in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vermont. She is based in Montreal, where she established Critical Neuroscience at McGill University, a research program which examines the social, cultural and political contexts of neuroscience and its implications for society. She is currently co-director of Uncertainty Academy, a Berggruen Institute fellow of the Future Humans program and a member of the Educational Ecologies Collective. She co-directs the Family Care Collective, a Montreal-based community organization, and is working on a hybrid fiction manuscript about wild things — flowers, brains, hearts and cities.
Joshua Moses
Joshua Moses has worked on religious response to the attacks of September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, studying the formation of disaster expertise (“disaster religious and spiritual care”) in what he calls the current “New Age of Anxiety.” Joshua’s focus on action research, collaborative research methods, and community-engaged research has led him to work with a number of Philadelphia-area community and environmental organizations. His work on anthropology of mental health has focused on the production of knowledge in the context of disaster, intersections of spirituality/religion and mental health, and community response to disaster, environmental ruptures, and inequality. He is committed to combining research and teaching. He piloted a field school with students from Haverford College, University of Massachusetts and Inupiaq Alaskan youth in Northwest Alaska. Joshua also focuses on the response of educational institutions to climate change, and the ways we are (or are not) preparing students for futures that society itself struggles to imagine.
Contact
Please direct inquiries to info@uncertaintyacademy.org