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About the climate emergency, Margaret Atwood has famously said, ‘it’s not climate change, it’s everything change.’
The alteration of the planet’s ecosystems and climate is perhaps the largest change that has ever happened to human civilisation, if not the planet itself. We are right to be unnerved and daunted.
Throughout human civilisation, storytelling in its various forms – oral, written, visual – has helped humanity make sense of the randomness and the unpredictability of experience, and to help us prepare for the fact that our lives are finite. Stories are more than entertainment or an interpretive game: they are philosophy, religion, science. Without stories, none of these large-scale thought-systems would make sense.
But we have few if any stories to help guide us and understand the heating of the earth that the burning of fossil fuels has caused. Humanity has never lived through such a temperature spike, before. New stories, or new versions of old stories, are being rapidly written, performed, sung and imagined, to try to understand this new reality we all live in, humans and animals alike.
UEA’s Climate Change Narratives Project is attached to several research projects and structures within the university, including the Critical Decade for Climate Change Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme. It draws on the expertise of our world-renowned creative writing programme and our globally recognised leadership in climate change research. Staff and students alike are creating new stories to interpret the scale, dimension and formidable importance of climate change, in their teaching, their research and through networking and interdisciplinary collaborations.
At UEA, through Climate Narratives, we have created a forum for discussion of complex subjects through thinking imaginatively about story and the work it does in the world. We know that stories can activate people’s imagination, memory, knowledge and desires. They can provide a creative commons where personal experience and the structural forces that govern our lives can be registered and understood intuitively as well as intellectually. Our Climate Change Narratives Project is at the vanguard of a still-emerging reality. We are pleased to share some of these stories here.
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Audio
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Dystopia Utopia
Listen...PhD project: “From likely laggards to unlikely pioneers: The role of local politicians as agents of change in urban climate governance”
Text by Alfie Gaffney
Performed by Katie Stallworthy
Audio design by Roland Smith:focus(397x547:398x548))
Critical Decade
Listen...PhD Project: Border Stories: “Geographies of Vulnerability in the Anthropocene”
Text and performed by Iona MacDuff
Audio design by Roland Smith
Video
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Flutwein
Watch...PhD project: “Politicians and People: Understanding Social Influence Structures affecting Climate Policy Prioritisation”
Text, visuals and performance by Clara Kübler
Audio design by Roland Smith)
A Critical Decade
Watch...PhD project: "Windows into future climate risk: Informing adaptation policy in the global south"
Text, audio and design by Manasa Sharma