Future Fiction Makerspace

Chantal Bilodeau: 

Storytelling for Hopeful Climate Futures

How can stories help us create hopeful climate futures? What storytelling strategies might open pathways to imagine what lies beyond the dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives so prevalent in popular culture? If we are not only to survive but to thrive over the next century, we need to reframe the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be in this altered world. We need to transform anxiety and despair into courage and resilience. While this is no small feat, theatre can help. As a live storytelling medium, theatre can provide clues on how we may collectively take this existential leap.

Carmen Sippl: 

Method or Mindset? Some Thoughts on Teaching Futures Literacy in Literary Education

The future has become a much debated concept, fuelled especially by climate change and the associated situation of polycrisis. Due to sociologist Gérard Delanty, “the future, now more than at any previous time in history, is a way of experiencing the world”. Using the future to anticipate possible, probable, and desirable alternative futures is an essential step towards actively and responsibly shaping transformation. How can this objective of the UNESCO Futures Literacy programme (www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy) be anchored in teacher education? How can concepts of cultural and literary pedagogies promote future thinking in lecture theatres and classrooms? Interpreted as an educational concept for learning and teaching in the Anthropocene in the context of cultural sustainability, Futures Literacy inspires co-creative method design. Future fiction in children’s and young adult literature offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration to foster anticipation, imagination, and participation as key aspects of Futures Literacy.

Per Esben Svelstad: 

Visual Adaptation of Texts: Towards an Irreverent Sense of the World

We laugh too little when we talk about sustainability and the climate crisis. However, connecting to the world in all its weirdness can spur other emotions than the dread, anger, and hopelessness commonly associated with these topics. This talk addresses the whats, whys, and hows of using visual adaptation as a way of sensing the entanglements between humans and nonhumans in the literary classroom. In this way, I argue, working on literature can provide an irreverent breathing space from narratives of gloom.

Julia Hoydis: 

Staging Climate Futures and Intergenerational Justice

The talk explores ways to engage students in literary future-making via the example of contemporary eco-drama. It argues that intergenerational justice emerges as a key theme in these texts which oscillate between depicting conflict and clashing attitudes about climate futures and questions of how to cope with strong emotions such as eco-anger, anxiety, responsibility, blame, and loss. Case studies will include The Turquoise Elephant (2015), an absurdist satire by Australian playwright Stephen Carleton and The Trials (2022) by British playwright Dawn King, a haunting dystopian court-room drama for young adult actors, modelling the issues of accountability for the climate crisis on the Nuremberg Trials.