The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report highlights the deprioritisation of environmental concerns in the short term. They also note the largely unchecked rise of technological risks and the emergence of a new competitive order, as some of the key factors contributing to what they describe as an unstable world outlook. The authors of the report note that, “a contested multipolar landscape is emerging where confrontation is replacing collaboration, and trust – the currency of cooperation – is losing its value” (WEF, 2026, 7). Given this context, it is increasingly important for artists and scholars who argue for the power of performance and the creative arts to educate communities by fostering new ways of thinking about and responding to difficult topics. It is vital we work collectively to build collaborations and synergies that are meaningfully focused on shared goals and aspirations. We must also harness our skills to speak back to this world order and to hope for and work towards a more equitable and cooperative society.

One of the biggest issues facing humanity is the rapidly changing global climate. This is wreaking havoc in communities across the globe. In Australia, for example, we have experienced bushfires that have ravaged 404,000 hectares, which equates to devastation of a landmass five times the size of Singapore (Ham, Reference Ham2026). At the same time, we have also experienced major flooding in Queensland and flash flooding in Victoria that washed away tents, caravans and cars and caused extensive damage in tourist towns in those States. That these formerly “once in a century” events are happening increasingly frequently is a reality, and one that is making life difficult and indeed, precarious in many parts of the globe.

Acutely aware of the fraught global context and deeply engaged with weather, climate and forecasting, we were moved to develop a series of public-facing symposia to think through the role of performance and the arts in drawing attention to, and thinking differently about, these crises. Our aim was to bring artists, academics and community members together to explore the ways in which the arts might help us reflect on, and respond to, our rapidly changing climate and the complexities of life in this new reality. Furthermore, as co-curators of these symposia, we felt a responsibility and a desire to provide a space in which to generate productive discussions and considerations about this context with a range of interlocutors. Our intention was to showcase the work of key artists and researchers tackling the climate emergency from different perspectives and to bring these artists and scholars into dialogue with one another. In doing so we paid particular attention to opening up spaces for early career researchers to participate fully in the process. The focus was on establishing a pedagogical framework toward fostering transdisciplinary learning and relational collegiality.

Our approach to the symposia was informed by The Ediths Responsive Roundtable series (2021-ongoing), where participants are invited from across disciplines in an intentional move to dialogue and listen with difference. The Ediths Responsive Roundtables saw respondents invited to share an aspect of their own work in relation to a featured presentation which could be in the form of an exhibition, keynote address, reading, video or performance. In adapting this format for our series of three weather themed symposia, we invited a range of respondents to present ideas relating to their own practice and research, inspired by the ideas presented in each of the Keynotes. This enabled a deliberate flow of ideas and approaches that built on each other as we moved from one symposium to the next and created a thickening of ideas and conversation. Enlisting a responsive process enriched the dialogue between papers, presenters, respondents, and audience members. This Special Focus seeks to extend that process through four collaborative papers which all contribute to this responsive model in various ways.

The first symposium, “Art, Fire, Flood: A Symposium on Extreme Weather and the Creative Arts” (2024) facilitated the development of the paper Forecast: An Exhibition Inviting Slow Feeling Through Participation in Unstable Weather States by Jo Pollitt, Helena Grehan, Lilly Blue, Peggy Atkinson, Justine Dandy, Naomi Godden, Leanda Mason, Renée Newman, Alexa Taylor and Danielle Gilson. This paper features responses from artists, meteorologists, scientists and humanities scholars framed in relation to their experience of the Forecast participatory exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia.

From the second symposium, “Contested Weather: Sites of Performance, Politics and Engagement” (2025) emerged the paper featuring collective responses to the performance work Cut The Sky as shared by Marrugeku’s co-artistic director Rachael Swain during her Keynote presentation. Responses presented at the symposium by Olivia Slater and Sam Fox weave in around the work of Grehan and Pollitt in their paper entitled ‘Relating to difficult weather through creative practice: responses to Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky’ to generate a palimpsest of readings of the ways in which Cut the Sky foregrounds, considers and challenges weather states.

From the third symposium “Underwater Weather: Creative Responses for Deepening Human-Environment Connection” (2025), two papers emerged. Firstly, the Keynote paper by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris Weathering the Hydrocene: Embodied Encounters with Watery and Digital Worlds, in which she shares her work on the Hydrocene as a disruptive epoch. With particular focus on the four pillars of what she calls the Natural-Cultural water crisis, the paper includes responsive vignettes from Mary Rapp, Kathryn McMahon and Natalie Davey. This paper furthers the responsive model in sharing Bailey-Charteris’s thinking with the work of the respondents to her presentation. The final paper expands on the video and artwork Davey presented as her response to Bailey-Charteris in the form of a yarn with Renée Newman which considers the recent Kimberley flood and the role and complexity of a First Nations artist as first responder to that event. Bringing together video footage, reporting and storytelling, Davey’s River Report is a moving testament to the lived experience of extreme weather. Through her discussion with Newman the layers of feeling, fear and resilience emerge in a powerful rendering of image and text.

Each of the papers engages in a dialogic deepening that we hope translates to render a complex and layered experience in reading and indeed a continuation of the conversations initiated in the responsive model of the symposia. As forms of “slow writing” (Rose, Reference Rose2013) the papers connect people and place in an ensemble of responsivity that supports relational, active and ongoing conversations.