Welcome to StuCAN Festival 2025:
Entanglement
This year’s theme is rooted in ‘Entanglement’, and invites participants to explore reciprocity in the built environment through the “more than human” relationships we share on global and local scales. From land, communities, people and buildings, to materials, systems, flora and fauna, we want to inspire discourse, learning and unlearning about how we situate ourselves and design within the complexities of our shared planet.
Our built environment plays a crucial role in tackling the climate and ecological crisis, yet many young architects and students lack access to the resources, networks, and knowledge to drive real change. With your support, we can offer a space for all to be inspired to design regeneratively and build a more climate and socially conscious future.
Land & Community
This theme explores how people and places are deeply connected. It focuses on how local environments shape communities, and how communities, in turn, care for and restore the land. It’s about recognising that our well-being depends on the health of the ecosystems we live within. Through shared stewardship and cultural exchange, this theme asks how we can live more responsibly and collaboratively with the land.
Materials & Circularity
This theme considers how the materials we use hold histories, value, and impact. It questions how we can move away from wasteful, linear systems towards circular ones, where materials are reused, repaired, and reimagined. It invites reflection on the relationships between making, consuming, and the planet’s resources, encouraging design and production processes that sustain rather than exploit.
Technologies & Futures
This theme explores how technology can shape our collective future, both its possibilities and its responsibilities. It connects human creativity with digital and environmental systems, asking how innovation can strengthen rather than disconnect us from the natural world. It imagines futures where technology supports ecological balance, accessibility, and care for both human and non-human life.
Explore our programme below
Launch Evening / Friday 17th October
5:30PM – 8:30PM – Reid Lecture Theatre, Glasgow School of Art
We warmly invite you to join us in celebrating the launch of our ‘Entanglement’ Climate Action Festival! This Friday evening event will situate the Festival and include a range talks on the “more than human” connections we share in the built environment, alongside how we can embed climate action into our practice and design collectively for our future planet!
Our fantastic panel of speakers will introduce the Festival’s key themes of Land & Community ; Materials & Circularity ; and Technologies & Futures; relating to their own work, practice and activism across the UK and beyond:
- Becca Thomas, Director and Architect at New Practice
- Hani Salih, Curator, Designer and Researcher in Residence at the Design Museum’s Future Observatory
- Blanche Cameron, Associate Professor of Environmental Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture
Our speakers will also be joined by Meha Patel and Joe Bass from the Students Climate Action Network, sharing how you can get involved in climate action at your university and across our network! A Q&A and discussion will follow, with soft drinks and snacks included in the Reid Refectory giving an opportunity to connect with like-minded students and practitioners!
This event is open to all StuCAN Festival participants, GSA students and staff, and students from other Scottish schools. Plus, a limited number of tickets are available for local practitioners, professionals, and anyone passionate about climate action!
Tickets are free for students or with a small fee for anyone else. Your support is vital to make our StuCAN Festival a reality.
Day 2 / Sunday 19th October
9:00AM – 4:00PM – Civic House, Glasgow
Our Venue /
Our Speakers /
Check out the Posters around Civic House!
We’re currently adding our Festival Speakers to the website, stay tuned!
Our Festival Curator Team /
The 2025 Festival Curator Team is made up of current students, graduates and built environment professionals from across the UK!
Entanglement Resources /
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
3 Degree Neighbourhood by CIVIC SQUARE & Dark Matter Labs
English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks
Wild Fell: Rewilding Hawsewater by Lee Schoefield
Belonging: Natural Histories of place, identity and home by Amanda Thomson
Regenerative Architecture Index by Architects Declare, Architecture Today and Schuco
Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students by Sofie Pelsmakers, Aidan Hoggard, Urszula Kozminska and Elizabeth Donovan
Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future by Material Cultures
The Architecture of Waste: Design for a Circular Economy ed. by Caroline O’Donnell and Dillon Pranger
Natural Building Techniques: A Guide To Ecological Methods and Materials by Tom Woolley
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough, and Michael Braungart
Protest Architecture: Structures of Civic Resistance by Nick Newman
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern
Build Lifeboats, Not Coffins: Reimagining architectural education for a Just Transition, chapter by Scott McAulay, in ‘The Pedagogies of Re-use’, ed. Duncan Baker-Brown and Graeme Brooker
Architecture Without Extraction by Zosia Dzierzawska and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Our Festival Legacy /
Stay Tuned!
The legacy of the Festival is intrinsically embedded within our programme and themes, and we want to ensure that the weekend ‘returns the gift’ of the experiences of the participants to become a catalyst for future student climate action. As the second StuCAN Festival, it is also a continuation of StuCAN’s vision for increasing collective action across the UK and beyond.
Over the weekend, participants and StuCAN facilitators will be documenting reflections, exchanges, built experiments and knowledge through recordings, illustrations and building a natural material library. We will then look to curate and publish the outputs online and potentially a collectively made zine or publication, encapsulating the key learnings and celebrations from the weekend.
Why Your Support Matters /
Your support is vital to ensuring we can help students from across the UK and Ireland engage in climate literacy and and education. By choosing to support us, you can support the next generation of built environment professionals to design for our future planet, while engaging with ACAN’s international network of practitioners, educators, students and more!
Our Supporters /
Our StuCAN Festival would not be possible without our fantastic supporters! If you would like your name and company shown below, please donate to our Crowdfunder or get in touch!
Barbra Mcfarlane
Alison Phillips
Sam Stamp
Blanche Cameron
Thomas Parker
Mark Barnikel
Joshua Barnett
Anushka Gupta
Jeremy Till
Mariana Novosivschei
Francisco Garcia
Letitia Zhao
Jennifer Jiang
Bethany Elmer
Adam
Joe Penn
hk57530
Suzy Nelson
Raghuram Kalakuntla
