Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Abstract

Climate change places major transformational demands on modern societies. Transformations require the capacity to collectively envision and meaningfully debate realistic and desirable futures. Without such a collective imagination capacity and active deliberation processes, societies lack both the motivation for change and guidance for decision-making in a certain direction of change. Recent arguments that science fiction can play a role in societal transformation processes is not yet supported by theory or empirical evidence. Advancing the argument that fiction can support sustainability transformations, this paper makes four contributions. First, building on the imaginary concept, I introduce and define the idea of socio-climatic imaginaries. Second, I develop a theory of imagination as linked cognitive-social processes that enable the creation of collectively shared visions of future states of the world. This theory addresses the dynamics that bridge imagination processes in the individual mind and collective imagining that informs social and political decision-making. Third, emphasizing the political nature of creating and contesting imaginaries in a society, I introduce the role of power and agency in this theory of collective imagination. I argue that both ideational and structural power concepts are relevant for understanding the potential societal influence of climate fiction. Finally, the paper illuminates these different forms of transformational power and agency with two brief case studies: two climate fiction novels. I contrast a dystopian and utopian science fiction novel -Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth (2015). The two books are very similar in their power/agency profile, but the comparison provides initial insights into the different roles of optimistic and pessimistic future visions.

ART FOR CHANGE: Transformative learning and youth empowerment in a changing climate

“…Art, art-based methods, and aesthetics are considered an effective means of developing both passion and an emotional connection with sustainability issues (Shrivastava et al, 2012). Such approaches can also serve as a powerful means of expanding future imaginaries and developing new scenarios of transformative change (Galafassi et al, 2018b;Heras et al, 2016;Milkoreit, 2017;Tyszczuk and Smith, 2018). It has been argued that art has the ability to transform society and create agency among people (Boal, 2000).…”

“…It has been argued that artistic practices and approaches can potentially provide innovative solutions for adaptation and mitigation (Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012). The creative imagination inherent in many artistic approaches can provide new terms of imagining socio-cultural and environmental issues (Milkoreit, 2017). This is attributed to art's capacity of creative imagination and serendipity, which can generate spaces for active experimentation and imagination (Kagan, 2010;Whitehead, 2006).…”

“…This is attributed to art's capacity of creative imagination and serendipity, which can generate spaces for active experimentation and imagination (Kagan, 2010;Whitehead, 2006). Rather than buying in to "doom and gloom" narratives, artistic practices can stimulate new processes of inquiry and political engagement, opening up new possibilities for responding to climate change through more generative, supportive and integrative approaches (Hawkins, 2016;Milkoreit, 2017;Stoknes, 2015).…”

Dancing on the volcano: social exploration in times of discontent

“…Imagining a collective future always involves beliefs about values, norms, and ways of life that characterize a society (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Questions and visions of how life ought to be lived form the centerpiece of the need for and direction of change (Milkoreit 2017).…”

Just Transformations to Sustainability

“…These can take the form of transdisciplinary methods, informed by multiple communities of knowledge, which generate problem-based and solution-oriented data to inform decision making [158]. Alternatively, recent research highlights collective imaginaries [159] and futures methods [160] as creative approaches for envisioning radically alternative, and co-created, futures. Novel analytical tools, such as the Inequality and Transformation Analysis (ITA) framework, enable explicit engagement with broad structural drivers of inequality and open the possibility for more equitable societal transformations [161].…”