Session Information
07 SES 14 C, Literary Research in Times of Crisis
Symposium
Contribution
This paper focuses on speculative climate fiction as a transdisciplinary method for highlighting injustices in the present and imagining different climate and technological futures. I investigate an in-school research project that took place in Australia where year 9 English students engaged with the text Terra Nullius by Aboriginal author Claire Coleman. The project used ‘literary linking’ (Truman, Mclean Davies & Buzacott, 2021) to investigate themes of climate change, settler colonialism through cross-curricular collaboration between English literature and STEM. Australia, like the rest of the planet, is in a climate crisis. The past several years have seen extreme weather events including bushfires, flooding, and drought across the continent. Concomitantly, the crisis of settler colonialism continues in Australia, as highlighted in Coleman’s allegorical climate fiction which although set in a speculative future, incriminates the factual past. As an example of speculative climate fiction, Coleman’s text highlights the potential of narrative as a pedagogical and social tool for predicting, critiquing, and building a different world. Considering the material effects of stories in creating worlds aligns Indigenous scholars (Dillion, 2012) who argue for the power of narrative in shaping experience, critiquing the present, and positing different futures. Specifically, Indigenous climate fictions provide the opportunity for critical reflection on aspects of how our world currently is and where we might end up if we continue along certain paths (Whyte, 2018). These critical reflections then offer a chance for further speculative thinking which asks what needs to be done in the present to arrive at an alternative future. Data sources for the paper will include an engagement with climate fiction narratives, and discussion of an experimental cross-curricular project between English literary education and STEM, in a contemporary year 9 classroom in Australia. Students consider the power of narrative for thinking about climate, settler colonialism, and proposing different futures in times of crisis.
References
Dillion, G. (2012). Walking the Clouds (G. Dillion (ed.)). Arizona University Press. Truman, S. E., McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Disrupting intertextual power networks: challenging literature in schools. Discourse, 0(0), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2021.1910929 Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space, 1(1/2), 224.
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