Thesis
Imagined futures: Narrative fiction and climate science (Exegesis only)
Southern Cross University, School of Arts and Social Sciences
Masters by Thesis, Southern Cross University
2019
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Abstract
Imagined Futures: Narrative Fiction and Climate Science is a practice-led research project that investigates the question: Is creative writing in the form of narrative fiction a legitimate mode for communication of climate science? It addresses this question by exploring the theoretical, ethical, and novelistic choices, issues and dilemmas encountered in setting a fictional story in a realistic future changed in ways predicted by climate science.
Climate change is often described as a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel & Webber 1973). The term is used in a wide variety of disciplines to describe problems that are ill-defined and dynamic. Addressing climate change requires meaningful public engagement with climate science, but science communication is, in itself, a compounding wicked problem. One of the ways that research suggests for solving wicked problems is to use ‘forward reasoning’ to construct scenarios, in narrative form, based on thinking through plausible future plot lines (Bernstein et al. 2000). Cli fi (Bloom 2013) is a term coined to refer to an emerging field of literature concerned with creating imaginings of a climate-changed world. By linking facts into an engaging, coherent and personally meaningful narrative, cli-fi may be able to contribute to addressing the compounded wicked problem of climate science communication
Imagined Futures: Narrative Fiction and Climate Science consists of Warming, a 35,000 word excerpt from a realist near-future cli-fi novel, and an accompanying 15,000 word exegesis.
Warming aims to personalize climate change by imaginatively exploring how fictional characters experience it. It aims to investigate, through practice-led inquiry, the novelistic issues in world-building and storytelling near-future, realist cli-fi. The exegesis locates Warming within the emerging field of climate fiction and reviews research about the efficacy of narrative as a mode of science communication. It then discusses the applicability of a practice-led creative writing methodology to the research question, and goes on to critically reflect on practice through the lens of four strands of issues at the intersection of narrative fiction and climate science communication that were encountered in writing Warming. It reflects on the representational challenge presented by the scale and impersonality of climate change, the difficulties in fictional world-building when the process is constrained by scientific realism, the tension between the modelling of climate science and the storyteller’s desire for dramatic detail, and the ethical issues in rhetorical use of narrative fiction.
Through critical reflection, it is argued that cli-fi, particularly in the role of climate science communication, presents its own, unique set of dilemmas for the literary imagination, overlaid on the creative and technical challenges in writing any kind of literary fiction.
Details
- Title
- Imagined futures: Narrative fiction and climate science (Exegesis only)
- Creators
- Linda Woodrow - Southern Cross University
- Contributors
- Lynda Jane Hawryluk (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityRob Garbutt (General Contributor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Masters by Thesis
- Comment
Note: Exegisis only. The Creative component has Restricted access until September 2022.
- Theses
- Masters by Thesis, Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University, School of Arts and Social Sciences
- Identifiers
- SCU1684; 991012821014302368
- Copyright
- © Linda Woodrow 2019
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Resource Type
- Thesis