Personal to the Planetary Fellowship

29 April 2024

Ten new Community Fellows will inspire environmental research and action at the University of Bristol.

The Brigstow Institute and Cabot Institute for the Environment’s new Personal to the Planetary (P2P) Community Fellowships have brought together ten talented environmentalists for a deep and sustained engagement around the climate emergency.  

The Fellows are drawn from researchers, community groups, the voluntary sector, individuals and artists from a variety of professions and disciplines. 

Over a period of ten months the Fellows will form a core inter-disciplinary group to collaborate with the community and other stakeholders to consider climate change and our response to the climate emergency.  

Using a co-creative and intersectional cohort model, the Fellows will look at how the scale of the planetary crisis can disempower people from feeling they can act. They will work within communities and together as a cohort to have discussions about how people usually absent from climate debates can be brought to the fore. 

The new Fellows that have been appointed are: 

Yaz Brien. An activist and trainer with interests in climate justice and futures. 

Emma Geen. A disability climate justice consultant, researcher, author and activist. 

Natalie Hyacinth. A composer, researcher, cultural geographer with interests in blue environments. 

Tim Kindberg. A writer and creative technologist interested in imagined futures. 

Zakiya McKenzie. A writer, researcher, facilitator and journalist. 

Polly Meyrick.  An artist, musician, activist and farm worker. 

Emmanuella Morsi. An artist, producer, researcher and innovator. 

Erika Teichert.  A researcher with interests in visual culture and environmental justice. 

Iman Sultan West. An artist, poet, consultant and curator. 

Kirill Vlasov. A researcher, geochemist, climate activist and communicator. 

They will explore the challenge of working together across boundaries around different lived experiences, societal challenges, disciplinary disconnection and professional practices.  

Professor Debbie Watson, Brigstow Institute Director said: 'I am absolutely delighted to be welcoming this incredibly talented group of community fellows and excited to see what emerges in the process of their encounters and activities together. Tackling big societal issues such as the climate and biodiversity crises requires multiple voices and diverse forms of knowledge which we are proud to have been able to bring together through this innovative scheme'.

Professor Guy Howard, Director of the Cabot Institute for the Environment said “I am delighted to welcome our new Personal to the Planetary Fellows, who are jointly appointed by the Cabot and Brigstow Institutes. Personal to Planetary Fellows will bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to help us to understand how can navigate the scale and complexities of environmental change at local to global scales. The initiative will create valuable time, space and freedom for the fellows to collaborate and co-create new ways of thinking about how we manage environmental change, and I am excited to see what emerges”

Find out more about the project at personaltotheplanetary.blogs.bristol.ac.uk.


Materiality and Museum Extraction
Interdisciplinary artists and creative researchers Iman Sultan West and Emmanuella Morsi will also share about their partnership on ‘From Ghana to Bristol: Reimagining Reparative Justice in a Postcolonial World’. Through prior consultations and 1.5-month residency in Ghana with local creatives, farmers, social enterprises and academics, they are exploring how arts, indigenous wisdom and sustainable practices can inform new approaches to addressing colonial harm. This project is an evolution of ‘A Journey Home’ which looked at the history of the taxidermy Pangolin in Bristol Museum, which was taken from Ghana in 1828. This research is informing the development of Bristol Museum’s repatriation strategy in collaboration with Iman Sultan West (A Journey Home), Emmanuella Morsi (Access As A Creative Tool, AAACT) and Dr Edson Burton – where AAACT consults on replication, sustainability, and materiality.

Historian Zakiya McKenzie and scientist Kirill Vlasov have collaborated on ‘Tales From the Bottle’ — a partnership with Bristol Blue Glass and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery — to investigate the links between Bristol’s flourishing 18th- and 19th-century glass industry and the city’s central role in Atlantic enslavement and trade. Blending social history, artistic inquiry, and modern chemistry, the project uncovers new narratives of Bristol glass and its entanglement with the colonial histories of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas.

The From the Personal to Planetary talk series is co-produced and co-hosted by the Brigstow Institute, Cabot Institute for the Environment, creative associates Close and Remote and our 10 Personal to Planetary Fellows. This series is running during COP30, the biggest annual conference of negotiations for the future health of our planet. Find out more about COP30 and what the University of Bristol will be doing there.

29/04/2024 → 01/05/2025