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In social and environmental psychology it is increasingly recognised that a multitude of everyday practices – how we eat, travel, work and enjoy ourselves – can feel as though they are ‘locked in’ to carbon intensive lifestyle and cultural formations, making it extremely difficult for individuals, groups and communities to envision what achievable or desirable alternatives. From this perspective, collective demand for a just transition to sustainable societies depends on facilitating our capacity, individually and socially, to tell different stories about our future, ones that can address difficult emotions whilst envisioning alternative possibilities. In academic research, methods are needed that can encourage participants to imagine alternative sustainable futures. Work in this area to date has largely been quantitative, involving surveys of experts and computer modelling of possible counterfactual scenarios – i.e. ‘how could the future be different if Y happened or happens instead of X?’. This presentation briefly summarises recent research utilising qualitative and creative methods to address similar questions, by facilitating and analysing people’s capacity to create novel narratives about possible future worlds. We will then consider what we can learn from wider artistic and cultural developments in designing and delivering research and interventions that can resource, facilitate and analyse people’s capacity to collectively engage in counterfactual world-making, utopian thinking, and imagining of ‘alternative futures’ in the context of our ongoing climate and ecological crises.

Link to slides below:

From Nick Wood:

I discuss ways of using stories: both fiction, specifically speculative fiction (SF), as well as harnessing other (often marginalised stories) to try and find solutions to the current (and growing) climate crisis. This paper will thus foreground narrative approaches and, given an emerging form of ‘climate apartheid’, I make a particular argument for narrative justice as an essential component to finding ‘answers’ – i.e. our stories need to be both radical and inclusive to find solutions fit for the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants (and not just limited to human life too.) Discussing the climate crisis, I emphasise the unequal and unjust nature of this crisis, akin to a form of ‘climate apartheid’. Further developing the idea of using fiction to address climate issues, I highlight the rise of ‘climate fiction’. Given the adage that the personal is political, I will intersperse my account with relevant elements of my own life story too, which carry their own lived veracity – this will include references to climate fiction and my second SF novel Water Must Fall (2020). Finally, if there is time (or perhaps as an alternative workshop structure) we can co-create a collage of desired futures from participants, perhaps even starting to think how we pave the way there.