Complementing the main programme of the 2023 Radboud Conference on Earth System Governance is a curated selection of excursions and extracurricular activities. This offers participants the opportunity to engage with the nature,culture and people of our host city Nijmegen. From meditation sessions to shared walks for climate change, these activities are designed to foster deeper connections and meet other participants in an informal way. There will be guided audio tours, nature excursions, and future scenario sessions. Please sign up early to indicate your interest. While nearly all of the sessions require no extra fee, the organizers would like to know how to plan for numbers accordingly. In the event of registrations surpassing our capacity, we will reach out to the first individuals who signed up.
Explore the specifics of these activities beyond the conference venue below. Secure your spot by registering through the registration form or via our partner Arthouse LUX website. (Registration links available below)
List of excursions/extracurricular activities:
Audiotour through a future Nijmegen, organized by Nimma aan Zee
During this walk through Nijmegen, famous podcast duo Jozien Wijkhuijs and Dennis Gaens take you on an exciting journey. Through an audio story you travel to a Nijmegen after the great wave. What does that future look like? A fictional story about our city in 200 years. Are you joining? Bring a smart phone and headset.
This audio story was made for the Art for climate festival Nimma aan zee.
Addressing the climate and biodiversity crises as a challenge of imagination, arthouse LUX endeavors, through this festival, to confront these issues using the transformative force of art. (Please note that the walk may involve stairs in the city center!)
Date and time: 23 October 2023 | 7.30pm
Location: Arthouse LUX, Mariënburg 38-39 Nijmegen
Fee: €5.00
Screening: White Plastic Sky (@Arthouse LUX)
An animated feature film by TIBOR BÁNÓCZKI & SAROLTA SZABÓ (whiteplasticsky.com)
In a not too distant future without animals and plants where the price of human survival is high, a young man breaks every rule to save his wife.
Date and time: 24 October 2023 | 8.30pm
Location: Arthouse LUX, Mariënburg 38-39 Nijmegen
Fee: Free (for conference participants only)
Shared Walks for Climate Change
This innovative session is at once a participatory method and a form of embodied democratic practice that connects everyday lifeworlds and physical surroundings to larger questions of how to cope with planetary transformations. Our question is: How can we walk with others as climate change radically transforms life-as-we-know-it? The emotional and physical loss suffered due to climate change can be overwhelming and debilitating. Shared Walks/Climate Change Edition explores how embodied experience can turn into reflection and awareness, and how this can, in turn, enable agency and action.
Shared Walks is an initiative that opens a playful space for the exploration of the environment and others by walking. Based on this artistic/urban/participatory methodology, Shared Walks/Climate Change Edition was developed as an experimental contribution to respond to the climate emergency, trace its influences on the human psyche and the more-than-human environment. Participants walk in pairs, collect and share observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings, memories, stories, associations, mapping their surroundings. Participants are provided with a set of cards with different walking prompts, proposing minor changes in how they normally walk. This paves the way for an appropriation of places in which we live/work/walk, connect with others and trigger self-awareness on the traces of climate emergency, the emotions emerging from our experiences of it (e.g. anger, resolve, anxiety, grief), potential actions (ranging from collecting and maintaining memories to solidarity and passionate political action). By walking in pairs around Nijmegen, in accordance with the challenges and questions proposed by the cards, participants will investigate the emotional and physical traces of climate change, and explore the ways in which we can understand and act on it in a reflection session.
Date, Times and Locations: 25 October 2023
- 11.00am – 11.15am Introduction | Conference Registration/Information Desk (Grotius Building, main entrance)
- 11.15am to 12.15pm – Walk
- 12.15pm to 12.30pm – Break | Participants are welcome to join the Reflection Session Room | Room GR 1.143 (Grotius Building)
- 12.30pm to 2.00pm – Reflection Session | Room GR 1.143 (Grotius Building)
Meditation for the Earth
Have you felt overwhelmed in the face of existential crises like biodiversity loss and climate change? Ecoanxiety, and anxiety in general, is becoming prevalent in societies around the world. How can we find peace when all around is in flux?
Why not take a moment from your busy conference schedule to simply breathe. We invite you to come and sit or walk (depending on the weather) together for a 30-minute guided mindfulness practice. We will join in solidarity and gratefulness for Mother Earth, taking a moment to reconnect with ourselves and the greater whole. All are welcome. No prior meditation experience is required.
Date and Time: 26 October 2023 | 4.30pm
Location: Meeting point | Conference Information/Registration Desk
No registration needed
Scenario sessions
Come play in this pilot of Scenario Sessions where we will experiment and experience new forms of democratic decision-making, based on artistic inputs from theatre.
New inputs for decision-making are needed as our current democracies are not sufficiently capable to deal with major social challenges such as the climate and biodiversity crisis.
Scenario sessions is a participatory method in which information is being collected out of the polyphony within a topic. Then this information is translated into a desirable scenario. This method is strongly based on the theatrical principles of pre-enactment. Pre-enactment can be seen as a theatrical rehearsal that enables people to interact with what may happen in the future. In this way we not only relate cognitively to this future scenario, but we can consciously feel and realistically experience what it means to move into that future; what questions does it raise, what possible problems will arise, what interests will clash?
By playing different roles in relation to the issue, polyphony becomes an important value in democratic decision-making. Not only human parties are given a voice, but also for instance the wind, the water and the soil play a role in the pre-enactment.
The pre-enactment movement sees democracy as a rehearsal stage, a space in which the spectator (participant) acts as the author or shaper of decision-making for the future.
Date and Time: 26 October 2023 | 7:30pm to 10.00pm
Location: Arthouse LUX, Mariënburg 38-39 Nijmegen
Excursion Voedselbos Groesbeek
The food forest concept proposes an integration of forestry techniques and productive agriculture. The concept challenges the idea of separating agriculture from biodiversity by suggesting the application of knowledge intensive techniques can provide forest habitat and bountiful food production. One of the leading individuals in the movement to spread food forests is Ketelbroek in Groesbeek. Our hosts Wouter van Eck and Pieter Jansen will lead the tour of the site and explain the movement. Come with questions!
Preparation
- Please have had lunch and been to the bathroom before leaving
- Bring your own water and healthy snacks
- Wear comfortable shoes and watch the weather forecast for appropriate clothing
Programme
- Start of visit at the Dorpshuis for a presentation about the food forest concept
- Walk 5 minutes to the food forest site for a guided tour.
- Your Radboud chaperone: Adam Calo, Assistant professor of environmental governance and politics
- Our hosts: Wouter van Eck and /or Pieter Jansen
Date and time: 27 October 2023 | 1.00pm to 4.00pm
Location: Excursion starts @ Dorpshuis Reestraat 2 at Groesbeek – De Horst
How to get there? 45 min bike ride (with some hills) or bus ride. Starting point 12.00pm at Central station (more details will be provided to participants)
Excursion Living Lab Ooijpolder
The Ooijpolder is a rural area adjacent to the city of Nijmegen, between the hills and river Waal. This area is an example of three types of biodiversity restoration: rewilding, flower-rich dikes and landscape restoration in the agricultural landscapes. Radboud University collaborates with several partners from this area in a Living Lab to understand the ecological gains of these types of restoration and its socio-economic drivers. This walking tour starts under the Waalbrug (the bridge across the river Waal, in the city centre) and explores these three types of restoration and places these efforts in a broader societal context.
- Length: 5 km.
- We will walk on flat terrain with a high chance of muddy trails
- Duration 2-3 hours
Date and time: 27 October 2023 | 10.00am to 1.00pm
Location: Excursion starts under the Waalbrug (the bridge across the river Waal, in the city centre)