David Rousell

David Rousell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Education and co-director of the Creative Agency Lab at RMIT. He is also Visiting Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is a core member of the Manifold Lab in the Education and Social Research Institute. As an artist and researcher, David’s work is invested in the collective reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments in response to the onset of climate change and the Anthropocene. His PhD project, States and Territories, involved the permanent installation of environmental artworks and digital interfaces across the campus of a regional university, effectively building new mobilities for collaboration across the arts, sciences, and humanities in responding to climate change at university-scale. As co-leader of the Climate Change and Me project (2014-ongoing), David has worked with hundreds of children and young people as co-researchers investigating the impacts of climate change in their local environments and communities. This project has led to a range of impactful outputs co-produced with children and young people, including a travelling exhibition, publications of children's writing and art, a climate education mobile application, and an inquiry-based climate curriculum now in schools across Australia. Since 2017 David has led the international Local Alternatives project, a creative platform for intergenerational collaborations between children, artists, academics, and urban citizens responding to climate change in cities. Following a series of co-produced projects with children in the UK and Europe, David is now working closely with ArtPlay, MPAvilion, and the National Gallery of Victoria to develop Melbourne-based iterations of the Local Alternatives platform.

David's recently published monograph Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021) introduces the posthumanist philosophy and creative methodology that underpins his approach to this work. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, is titled Climate Child Imaginaries: Posthuman Research Playspaces (Springer Nature, 2021).