Good Science Fiction Requires Good Science: Merging Imagination, Performance, and Science in Climate Justice Education (Poster 7)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Objectives
The climate crisis is a “crisis of imagination” (Ghosh, 2016). This paper considers how imaginative worldbuilding through writing for performance can support climate and environmental justice education.

Perspectives
Writing for performance, either for the stage or the screen, can be a generative exercise for exploring the multiple dimensions of social injustices in general (Gallagher 2022, 2021, 2020; Medina and Campano, 2006; Whitelaw, 2019; Vasudevan et al., 2010) as well as issues of climate and environmental justice more specifically (Doyle, 2020; Gallagher et al., 2022; Osnes, 2018, 2017).

Modes of inquiry
I work with Gallagher, Wessels and Ntelioglou’s notion of a “metho-pedagogy”, in which “using arts-based or participatory methods, asks the researchers to adapt fluidly to important affective moments as they arise in research sites and reshape the social relations within them” (2012, p. 239).

Data sources
The data for this inquiry is an “ethnographic illustration” (Gallagher et al., 2022) that comes from an ongoing creative writing group I facilitated with high school-aged Black youth working at a community farm. We were writing an Afrofuturist screenplay that centered the afro-indigenous food and farming traditions they were learning about in their work.

Conclusions
Our story is, by common notions, fictional and fantastical. It involves space and time travel and characters that do not exist in our world. However, for youth writers, building and navigating this world was an opportunity to grapple with critical insights about the world we inhabit. During an early brainstorming session, a youth writer reminded us that even if we, like the people in our emerging story, were to flee to another planet if this one is rendered uninhabitable, we will still be human, which means that there's just as much of a chance that we will let the worst parts of ourselves get the best of us and continue to wreak havoc wherever we go. We discussed how, already, “billionaire space races” are showing that inequity and injustice are galactic phenomena, and scientists and storytellers alike have warned us that there is still so much work to be done here if we are to keep ourselves from replicating these problems elsewhere. Building this world, therefore, was not about creating new realities so that we can absolve ourselves of the mistakes we have made in this one. Nor was it about ignoring the science and the truth of the world we live in. In order to write creatively about food cultivation, climate change, and social justice, we needed to understand how they operate in the world we live in.

Scholarly Significance
Imagining a better future, therefore, requires keen and purposeful observations of the present. It requires science. Writing our story required an integration of the sciences and the creative arts. This is the sort of interdisciplinary creative climate communication education that Doyle (2020) argues can help “facilitate young people’s collective and social transformative engagements with climate change” (p. 2749) and can help them build a sense of “response-ability” (Haraway, 2016, p. 34) that promotes thoughtful and responsive action.

Author

• OreOluwa Badaki, Teachers College, Columbia University