About

How can arts and theater techniques help people better communicate and understand environmental risk? 

More than 360,000 people live and work in an active caldera (or collapsed volcano) called Campi Flegrei west of Naples, southern Italy. The nearby and well-known volcano, Vesuvius, is a monumental source of risk. Campi Flegrei, however, is far more powerful and dangerous and yet it can be difficult to convey this risk even to residents living inside of it. It is, effectively, hidden in plain sight. It operates as a metaphor and proxy for any large risk, such as anthropogenic climate change: once a problem is too large it paradoxically can become harder to see.

Gallatin HIVE supports the project's still-forming international working group of research scientists, arts practitioners, and theorists. We seek to develop new methodologies for communicating environmental risk across disciplines as well as build an international network with other scientists, creative practitioners, and local community groups.

The project spans from 2024-2027. 

The climate emergency demands major transformations in the ways that we approach academic disciplinary divisions as well as the ways that scientific data and interpretations are communicated. While planetary in scale, the impacts of environmental degradation and change are not evenly distributed, equitable, or clearly understood by those at risk. The primary goal of our transdisciplinary, collaborative research is to permit better communication of scientific understandings of environmental risks with communities, particularly ones in which there is a pre-existing lack of trust (often for good reason) in scientists or political leaders from negative past experiences.