Bite-sized

Day 1: Thursday, 12 September

Climate change is profoundly transforming how the future is imagined, and visions of the future in the present have political consequences. Climate politics is dominated by scientific scenarios of potential futures (such as IPCC reports, IAMs, SSPs, etc) and political visions and strategies for decarbonisation, Net Zero, Just Transitions etc. Yet cultural visions of the future also have political power. Textual analysis of climate fiction can be a tool for critique and reimagining alternative futures (Haraway, 2016; Johns-Putra, 2019; Thaler, 2022), for expanding spheres of empathy and understanding (Nussbaum, 2017), for defamiliarising the present (Jameson, 2007), as well as for illuminating dominant ideologies and obstacles to climate justice (Ghosh, 2016). This session is intended to introduce and discuss the methodological opportunities, tools and challenges in analysing fictional visions of climate futures. The session will be led by two researchers in International Politics (Charlotte Weatherill and Carl Death) who have used novels, films, short stories and poems in their own research to understand alternative climate futures from various global perspectives, especially in and from Africa and the Pacific. It will involve short presentations on their research projects, followed by semi-structured discussion with participants shaped by research agendas and challenges faced in the group, as well as reflections on topics including: What does climate fiction do, politically?; Approaches to analysing climate fiction, including as socio-climatic imaginaries; defamiliarization; ethical reflection; postcolonial theory; feminist methodologies; Reading fiction alongside policy texts; Positionality, appropriation and the ethics of reading; Eurocentrism and Whiteness; Resistance and counter-narratives.