Decolonising Data, Reimagining Relationships: Reflections from the Learning with the Land Symposium 

June 2025 | SWISP Lab  

This weekend, SWISP Lab had the honour of participating in the Learning with the Land Symposium at the University of British Columbia an international gathering grounded in land-based pedagogies and arts-based inquiry, led by Professor Emerita, Dr Rita L. Irwin, Dr Shannon Leddy and PhD Candidate, Nicole Rallis.  

Rita, Sarah, Cassie and Kate at Steveston Fisherman’s Memorial, Garry Point Park.  

As a presenter and workshop facilitator, SWISP Lab offered a window into our speculative, youth-led, and (de)colonising approaches to climate metho-pedagogies and data.  

Hosted on the unceded lands of the Musqueam peoples at the University of British Columbia, this international gathering brought together artists, arts educators, and arts-based researchers across Canada, the U.S., Norway, Australia, and Japan to explore how art education can respond to the climate crisis through land-based, relational, and decolonial pedagogies. SWISP Lab offered a provocation called Decolonising Data, Reimagining Relationships: Art, Algorithms & Anthropocenic Ethics, while PhD Candidate, Cassandra Truong posed, A Becoming Art Educator’s role in Repurposing art for Reconciliation and Reconnection.  

Who We Are: SWISP Lab 

SWISP Lab is an a/r/tographic research collective based at the University of Melbourne. Our vision is to empower, transform and activate young people and educators for loving, living and learning in the Anthropocene through hacking time, while lingering in immersive speculative workshops that foster socially just and creative futuring. At the core of our approach is the Hacking the Anthropocene Kit (HAK.io), a mobile methodology or mega game that sparks a collaborative living inquiry by locating tipping points in the body in relation to climate collapse, data justice, and algorithmic ethics. 

Our Contribution: Speculating Otherwise 

Our presentation unpacked SWISP Lab’s commitment to speculative a/r/tography, a practice that inter-weaves art, research, and teaching into ethical, relational living inquiries shaped by young peoples’ lived experiences – beginning with the question, “With the whole bloody catastrophe laid out before us, at what point do we intervene?” 

From Melbourne to Bengaluru, Atlanta to New Delhi, we shared how youth-led climate stories of floods, fires, droughts, and disappearing monsoons become the source material for speculative gameplay, data visualisation, poetic expression, and activist storytelling. We highlighted one such creation, “Love in the Anthropocene”, a data-poem that translates collective sorrow and hope into new emotional cartographies, including emoji grief maps and digital collages of loss and longing. 

Wide-awakeness frees us to see more… what is absent, what is realised. 
– Maxine Greene 

Inspired by Maxine Greene’s call to attend to the world with aesthetic alertness, our work champions wide-awake learning where data is sensed, felt, and transformed, not just analysed or rendered. HAK.io avoids algorithmic colonialism by embracing data creativities that are relational, reparative, and radically inclusive. Drawing on feminist data science (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and posthuman ethics (Braidotti, 2019), our approach invites young people to hack the Anthropocene through artful, embodied inquiry in relation to the Anthropocene. 

Highlights and Resonances 

The LWL Symposium echoed many of the values we hold dear: slowness, attunement, place-based pedagogy, and a refusal of the single story of planet during these complex times. We were moved by the diversity of land-based practices shared across the broader LWL project from walking collaborations, museum activations, Indigenous epistemologies, and cross-cultural partnerships with Elders and communities.  

We come away asking: What stories do lands hold? And, what stories do young people need to tell to survive what’s coming? 

Looking Forward 

SWISP Lab will continue to expand its work through residencies, educator workshops, and international collaborations as we prepare for AUSMUN in India in August 2025. Our upcoming activations include curriculum pilots with youth climate mediators, a research residency at Science Gallery Melbourne and continued engagements with partners Professor Eri Saikawa at Emory University and Science Gallery Bengaluru to support place-based, youth-led climate storytelling. 

A Call to Act Otherwise: A HAK.io Manifesto

^{Engage in Decolonial Data Practices: critically examine and reimagine your approach to data collection, analysis, and representation, especially in research and educational contexts.} 

^{Amplify Youth Voices: create platforms and opportunities for young people to share their stories and perspectives on climate change and the Anthropocene.} 

^{Embrace Speculative A/r/tography: educators, researchers, and artists should turn to speculative a/r/tographic approaches in their work to stimulate imagination and create new knowledges.} 

^{Rethink Land-Technology-Anthropocene Relations: reconsider their relationship with Land and technology, turn to reciprocity and respect for non-human entities.} 

^{Implement Ethical AI and Algorithmic Practices: develop and use AI and algorithms that respect diversecultural perspectives and avoid replicating social and ecological injustices.} 

^{Support Issue-Oriented Hackathons: organise and participate in hackathons that address climate change and other pressing social and environmental issues.} 

^{Integrate Arts and Aesthetics in Climate Education: advocate for the inclusion of arts-based approaches in climate change education to awaken imagination and foster emotional connections to the issue.} 

^{Promote Data Feminism: adopt data feminist principles in research and data practices to challenge power imbalances and promote equity.} 

^{Cultivate “Wide-Awakeness”: actively seek out and create experiences that promote a state of “wide-awakeness” in relation to climate change, equity and justice.} 

^{Collaborate Across Disciplines: collaborate more with artists, scientists, educators, and technologists to address complex Anthropogenic challenges.} 

The Anthropocene demands more than awareness, it asks for new modes of relation, new storying practices, and new pedagogies. Here, we present our HAK.io Manifesto and invite you to explore our work or maybe even join a future hackathon at Science Gallery Melbourne. 

This project is funded by SSHRC.