What Were We Thinking? A Climate Fiction Beginning and Ending, Told Inside and Outside and Backward and Forward

We resonated with the idea that dreaming is important, and that climate fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. A well of resistance lives in art collaborations around the world which harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and twist, bend, and dance them in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alison Laurie Neilson, Sevgi Aka, Dwight Owens, Julia Jung, Małgorzata Suś
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press
Series:Australian Journal of Environmental Education
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0814062625100529/type/journal_article
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Summary:We resonated with the idea that dreaming is important, and that climate fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. A well of resistance lives in art collaborations around the world which harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and twist, bend, and dance them into alternative hopeful pasts, presents and futures. Engaging with other people and more-than-human lives, through creative collaborations have led us to understand complex and unfamiliar perspectives in ways that are unreachable alone, regardless of how much academic study we do. This story emerged from online meetings that crossed time zones and oceans: Vancouver to Istanbul. Our climate fiction surfaced from improvised, spontaneous story creation. It was as if the story was waiting for us to find her, if we acted with care and love while facing directly our own dark shadows and fears about climate catastrophe. This story of Cassandra, alongside our interpretations of its emergence, invites the reader to draw from any evoked confusion or other feelings as well as their own learnings to reflect on burdens of knowledge not acted upon. Leaning into confusion is a way to open up to the power of uncertainty for environmental education.
ISSN:0814-0626
2049-775X