Bristol – Beaufort Futures: Living and Imagining Environmental Change

The project begins with the idea that Beaufort, South Carolina and Bristol, U.K. share quite a number of characteristics, both in terms of their histories, as well as their potential futures as cities. The project proposes to think about the two cities together as a way to talk about how communities and individuals negotiate living with climate change and environmental precarity. The project addresses the Brigstow theme of “Living Well with Uncertainty”, and will hope to expand on this theme by asking what it means to imagine life and well-being specifically in the face of climate change and environmental uncertainty. Through a conversation between city officials, academics and artists, the project will ask questions about how communities at the city level respond to these changes in local ecologies, as well as how individuals imagine their lives in the face of global change. Bristol-Beaufort Futures will explore how these two cities might be uniquely situated to allow us as global citizens to ask what new forms of precarity – but also experiences of community and fellowship – are being inaugurated at this time?