The Social Impact of Climate Fiction. A Cross-Disciplinary Conference

Overview: This conference seeks to consolidate emergent scholarship and artworks that explore the power of narrative to motivate climate-conscious action. The emphasis in this conference is on climate narratives in practice; in other words, it is concerned with works that apply these narratives in various public-facing contexts.

The study of climate fiction, texts exploring the impact of climate change has proliferated alongside the now-familiar call for better narrative accounts of the Anthropocene.[1] At the same time, it is not enough to generate simply more of these narratives; the crucial task remains to evaluate how they are taken up by readers and audiences and make meaning in the world.[2] To this end, the conference’s presentations will be categorized within three areas where it is possible to assess this literature’s potential impact: the implementation of climate narratives in the classroom (pedagogy); empirical studies of climate fiction’s reception (empirical ecocriticism); and artworks that embed narratives for the purpose of inspiring greater climate consciousness (climate activism). Rather than repeat calls for more and better representations of climate change in fiction, this conference takes stock of the most recent innovations in eco-storytelling and asks: how should the urgency of the climate crisis (and the resulting call to action) affect our expectations from, and experience of, reading literature today? And what evidence emerges for fiction’s capacity to inspire greater ecological awareness?

These questions strike at the core of the environmental humanities. To answer them requires the contributions of researchers as well as those at the front line, so to speak, of the fight to foster ecological awareness: teachers, artists, and activists. Bringing these groups together, this conference stresses the wide interest in topics such as climate fiction and eco-literacy. Moreover, it stresses the complementary approaches of these fields and, in doing so, facilitates both nuanced insights and a comprehensive overview of the public’s climate-change imaginary. This knowledge exchange is even more urgent given the acceleration of the climate emergency locally and across the globe.

Speakers: The keynote speakers reiterate the conference’s mission of bridging empirical, pedagogical, and artistic accounts of climate literature. These confirmed speakers include (as of writing): Dr. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Colby College, USA), a field-defining researcher on the influence of climate narratives on readers; Dr. Julia Bentz (University of Lisbon), a leading expert on environmental pedagogy; and the Danish author Theis Ørntoft, whose accolades include the European Union Prize for Literature (2024).

Suggested Topics include but are not limited to:

• The uses of climate fiction in different educational contexts to explore the effects of the ecological crisis and engage with more-than-human perspectives (e.g., “bewildering” education,[3] ecoliteracy, eco-composition, “re-wilding” [4] pedagogies).
• Examinations of emotional and affective responses to the ecological crisis (e.g., eco-anxiety, solastalgia, ecological grief) in different age groups and geographical contexts through literature.
• Quantitative and qualitative analyses of climate fiction’s impact on readers (individual readers, reading groups, other collective experiences of literature).
• Innovative methodological approaches to the empirical study of climate fiction and its narrative strategies, including citizen-science methodologies and contributions to “empirical ecocriticism.”[5]
• Climate fiction produced in collaboration with nonprofessional writers in different linguistic and cultural contexts in the Global North and South.
• The “uses of literature” in climate activism and original, post-anthropocentric climate fiction written by environmentalist groups.
• The histories of slow violence as seen through the lives and artistic works of writer-activists.
• Studies of the socio-technical imaginaries emerging from various genres of speculative climate fiction (e.g., dystopia, solarpunk, weird fiction).

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Submission Guidelines: Please submit your 250-word abstract for 20-min presentations and a short bio to clifi.conference@gmail.com by November 1, 2024.

Accepted speakers will be notified by December 31, 2024. The conference is scheduled to take place in person. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the conference organizers at yazell@sdu.dk and lnole@sdu.dk

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[1] E.g., Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016; Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.

[2] Hamilton, Jennifer, Emily Potter, and Killian Quigley. "Do Stories Need Critics? Environmental Storyism and the Ends of Ecocriticism." Textual Practice (2024): 1-23.

[3] Snaza, Nathan. "The Earth Is Not “Ours” to Save." Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, edited by jan jagodzinski, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 339-57. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures.

[4] Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth, edited by Michael Paulsen et al., Springer Nature, 2022.

[5] E.g., Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2023.