Telling your story: Engaging Audiences in Climate Research
Leaves and litter collect in doorways nearby
as motorbikes cut through the air
past vanished bicycles
Only three birches and
four London plane trees in sight
The rest,
brick and concrete
tarmac and human
save for dandelion leaves and rye grass
pushing through
And a lone buddleia
flopped over the barbed wire boundary
of a car park.
Millie Prosser
School of Law, ‘Climate mitigation through the decisions of courts: A critical evaluation’
What is a story? Does it differ from narrative? Why is storytelling important? These are some of the questions we asked students of the Leverhulme-funded Critical Decade for Climate Change (CDCC) programme, along with some of their supervisors, as part of a day-long storytelling workshop held at The National Centre for Writing, and delivered as part of a project enabled by a NERC Discipline Hopping for Discovery Science seed funding grant awarded in 2022.
Humanity’s capacity to deal with and legislate on the climate crisis requires both an ability to tell stories about what is happening, and to evaluate those stories being told. The workshop aimed to bring creative strategies to the forefront of students’ thinking about their climate research. We prompted participants to question how we shape stories and narratives, and the extent to which we are shaped by those created by other people.
“Stories are spoken, gestured, danced, dramatized, painted, drawn, etched, sculpted, woven, stitched, filmed, written and any combination of these modes and more,” wrote Louise Gwenneth Phillips and Tracey Bund in Research through, with and as storying (Routledge 2018) – A number of different performative and creative writing exercises were employed in order to encourage students to be alive to the creative potential of the stories they are discovering, and to try out different ways of telling them in order to engage an audience.
After establishing a broadly theoretical framework for story through discussion, students worked in groups to ‘perform’ each of their theses to the group as a whole. These performances drew out shared resonances across very different research areas: destruction and refusal, for example, countered by collective action and regrowth.
The focus of the day was on encouraging students to think differently – to break out of the formal mode of summarising a thesis in order to connect with an audience. “It made me feel a bit more liberated, in terms of the stories I could tell,” one of the students observed.
The CDCC is a ground-breaking doctoral programme generating agile and interdisciplinary thought leaders for the 21st Century. A key goal of the programme is to support these talented scholars to incorporate story-making into their research, to help imagine possible futures and scale up action. In an article in WIREs Climate Change (July/August 2011), Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys defined the imagination “as a way of seeing, sensing, thinking, and dreaming the formation of knowledge which creates the conditions for material interventions in and political sensibilities of the world."
“Working creatively, through the imagination, opens a space to draw out the emotional aspects of a research story, placing data in its human as well as its academic context. Such creative methods not only offer different approaches to thinking through research, but also tools to find innovative ways to present this research to the wider public.” – Dr Elizabeth Lewis-Williams
A key part of this workshop series as it progresses is to foster a sense of community, and to gather stories as they emerge. Future workshops for the group will develop other methods of recording and sending despatches from the field, as well as continuing to develop storytelling skills. The stories these scholars are uncovering are of global significance, and it is important that they engage, communicate, advocate, and stimulate action beyond the confines of the academy. We live within the extended moment of the climate crisis, within its story. This project will not only enable to students to tell their parts of that story, it will also enable researchers of the future to better understand this moment.
The afternoon session offered an opportunity to consider ways of developing a story through field notes: in this instance, recording impressions from ‘the field’ in the form of poetry. The two extracts (top of page and below), created as a short exercise, reflect the powerful immediacy of this kind of response, as well as light-touch observation on the balance between the human and non-human worlds.
‘Field Notes’
Fresh blue paint reaches over the moving water
Live among the plant-burst bricksNew arrivals, sober, in functional grey,
Rub shoulders with St Julian's weathered flint.
A gold-encrusted head guards the gate,While 16 floors of mute concrete tower above,
aged before their time,Glowering at the rise of steel and glass,
bending with the river.
Dr Peter Emmrich
John Innes Foundation Fellow, School of Global Development
For the final exercise of the day, we asked students to include one element of fiction to their research story (a different researcher, a fictitious character) in response to the prompt: “There are infinite ways of telling the truth, including fiction, and infinite ways of evading the truth, including non-fiction.” (Jenni Diski 'Skating to Antarctica' P.220).
Memo 1
Why is it so cold in the lab? It’s not the most pressing question, and unrelated to my research, but it’s what stays as a lingering impression on my skin long after I’m out the door and back home in front of, let’s face it, a screen. Is it because most of the scientists are men? But they’re not. But maybe they thought they would be? Maybe no-one’s told the thermostat it’s not the 1970s anymore?
Maybe it’s to keep us alert? Always on the point of discomfort. Never quite relaxed. Able to react. Maybe it’s for them? The droids. The thought gives me a slight shiver. That their preferences are already taking precedence. Maybe the temperature is set to their optimum performance conditions. To their…liking?
I’m here to observe the human-droid relationship. And quite clearly coming with positions I’m going to have to be pretty fucking reflexive about. I have misgivings. Which I managed to hide from the research ethics team somehow, but here they’re front and centre. I find it all a bit uncanny. This including of the droids in our multispecies entanglements; in our concepts of collaboration; in what we might call livability.
Iona Macduff
School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, ‘Border Stories: Geographies of Vulnerability in the Anthropocene’
Utopia 2050
A gavel crashes. Legislation is passed, cross party support gained for progressive, ambitious, yet realistic change. Politicians' views align with planetary needs. Society and nature intermix, and learn to live together. Warming is halted, and even reversed to a primordial state. Liberal parties flourish, unleashed from the shackles of austerity. The net zero Tsar's local big bang reverberates, propelled by a Cambrian explosion of community action. Seasons stabilise. No more wildfires, droughts, or floods. Local communities prosper. Grassroots groups abound and green growth is reanimated.
Alfie Gaffney
School of Environmental Sciences, ‘Understanding the role of politicians in delivering Net Zero’
Dr Elizabeth Lewis Williams is a Norwich-based poet and teacher who completed her doctorate in Creative-Critical writing, exploring aspects of scientific and poetic measure in Antarctic poetry, at the University of East Anglia. Elizabeth is interested in writing about place across time, and the role poetry can play not just in ‘speaking’ place, but in thinking through the complex mesh of cultural, environmental, scientific and personal concerns associated with our perception, and experience, of it. She has published two volumes of poetry, 'Erebus', and 'Deception Island', and in collaboration with Story Machine and other partners, created an immersive installation in a replica Antarctic hut which has been touring in the UK. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals, including ‘The Polar Record’ and ‘Magma’,
She is currently writing a work of creative non-fiction on Antarctica, supported by the Arts Council, England, as well as developing a multi-media, multi-lingual collaboration 'I am your past/Yo soy tu pasado' which connects the ecosystems of Amazonia and Antarctica through letters, poems, video and sound pieces.