Taylor Swift: Out of the woods - or into them?

Speaker: Elly McCausland

Is pop megastar Taylor Swift an eco-icon or an environmental villain? Elly McCausland of Ghent University, Belgium, dives into the complicated relationship between nature and the star’s work.

In 2021, conservation scientist Jeff Opperman claimed in the New York Times that ‘Taylor Swift is Singing Us Back to Nature’, and that this mattered more than we might think. Yet Swift is hardly a poster child for environmentalism: her private jet usage, excessive album variants and poor-quality merchandise have become the topic of widespread critique.

Elly will argue that Swift’s music can nevertheless open up important insights into environmental concepts such as 'plant blindness' and 'ecophobia', shedding crucial light on humanity's fraught and complex relationship with our surroundings.

Join Elly to explore how the popularity and global reach of the star’s music might prompt us to re-examine our increasingly urgent need to - in the words of environmental historian William Cronon - live 'rightly in the world – not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both’.

Image credit: PickPik

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Host or Publisher York Festival of Ideas