Program – ClimateExistence 2021

I am the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden, with responsibility for education and collaboration, and Associate Professor in Literature and Pedagogy at the Department of English, also at Uppsala University. I teach and research on contemporary literature, pedagogy, and ecocriticism. My most recent book Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis (Routledge, 2021) has just been published. My other publications include another monograph Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave, 2016) as well as numerous chapters and articles in edited collections and journals, most recently in The Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (Palgrave, 2020) and Teaching the Literature of Climate Change (MLA, forthcoming). I contributed to a highly original edited collection called Loanwords to Live With: An Ecotopian Lexicon (Minnesota UP, 2019) and my essay on the Swedish word “fotminne” can be read about in “Parlör for ett vettigare sätt att tala om klimatet” (SvD, 2020) as well as in “The Search for New Words to Make us Care about the Climate Crisis” in The New Yorker, 2020.

In this session, we will ponder the difficulty and possibilities of carrying narratives about our time from academia to the public. We will discuss the importance of putting science in narratives, in contrast to stating isolated facts without connecting them to a larger context. We think that instead of handing out pieces of patchwork, it might be even more essential to give suggestions on how the pieces might fit together. This is especially important when the science has implications that contradict central ideas in the current economic, political, cultural and social paradigm.

When communicating complicated issues such as climate change-related knowledge, there is a difficult balance between, on the one hand, deep and nuanced descriptions and, on the other, simplified facts detached from context. Thus, this session not only grapples with how science can be communicated through narratives but also how it can be made accessible for people who do not live their lives in books.

In the session, we will reason together with you around these communications issues, but we will also show you our attempt to, at least in part, meet some of these challenges. We will present our ongoing work with a comic book that offers a narrative of the climate crisis and the needed transition to a fossil-free world. We hope that the book could be one small component in changing the narrative about the time in which we live. The comic book is to a large part based on Professor Staffan Laestadius books “Klimatet och välfärden” and “Klimatet och omställningen”. Laestadius is collaborating with us in this and is portrayed as the narrator of the story. We will show some examples of comic book “adaptations” of academic papers to make the core idea of said papers more accessible for non-academics. You will also be taken through visual narratives from our comic book, namely a narrative about the History of Emissions and one about Economic Growth.

During and after the fika break we’ll be discussing together in the group, sharing experiences and questions.

Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, writer, educator and President of the International Bateson Institute.
Ingrid Rieser is the host of Forest of Thought, a podcast that explores our ecology of ideas, re-examining the familiar and catching glimpses of the new: www.forestofthought.com

My goal is to examine and discuss what the impact of studying a particular imagined future might have on our understanding of current ethical discussions on climate change and ethics of nature. I relate my discussion to Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and Maddaddam (2013)).

Ustopia is a word made up by Atwood, and corresponds to an ambivalence of utopian versus dystopian thought. For me, the ethical implications are significant: Utopia needs dystopia to be a convincing ideal, and dystopia needs utopia in order that despair does not quench initiative and action. The ambivalence of ustopia contains a moral imperative that arises from coping with the paradoxical nature of hope mingled with despair when facing imagined and yet only all to familiar futures.

The novels help to articulate what I see as an important ethical guideline: The positive guidance and hopeful spur for action that an utopian vision of a good life provides, must be intermingled with dystopic warnings – and vice versa. In the current situation where climate change and its underlying visions of society, humans and nature to many of us often seem as runaway trains that cannot be stopped, but only accommodated, it is crucial that hope prevails in ethical reflections and calls to action.

* This paper develops further some ideas from an article I wrote in 2015 together with Mickey Gjerris, which was published as Eriksen & Gjerris: “On Ustopias and finding Courage in a Hopeless Situation” in Baron, Christian (ed): Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition. Springer, Cham, Switzerland 2017.

Shared Walks is an initiative that opens a playful space for the exploration of the environment and others by walking. Based on this artistic/urban/participatory methodology, Shared Walks / Climate Change Edition was developed as an experimental contribution that aims to respond to the climate emergency, trace its influences and our experiences on the human psyche and the more-than-human environment by walking. Participants walk in pairs and collect and share observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings, memories, stories, associations etc.; mapping their surroundings from different perspectives. Shared Walks / Climate Change Edition consists of a set of cards with different walking prompts. They propose minor changes in the way we normally walk, to pave the way for an appropriation of places, connect with others and trigger self-awareness related to the themes: the traces of climate emergency in the places we live/work/walk, the emotions emerging from our experiences of climate change (such as anger, anxiety, grief, hopelessness), the actions these emotions can bring about (ranging from collecting and maintaining memories to solidarity and passionate political action). By walking in pairs around Sigtunastiftelsen, in accordance with the challenges and questions proposed by the card set, participants of the walkshop will investigate the emotional and physical traces of climate change in their immediate environment, and explore the ways in which we can understand and act on climate change.