Journal article
Cli-Fi as Climate Change Education: A Posthumanist Ecofeminist Approach to Thinking with Australian Cli-Fi Narratives
Australian journal of environmental education, Vol.41(3), pp.1-13
08/09/2025
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Abstract
As climate change accelerates, its most devastating impacts fall on those already marginalised, deepening existing inequalities. This underscores the need for climate change education to attend not only to the scientific but also to social, cultural and ethical dimensions. Like science fiction, climate fiction (cli-fi) has often reinforced colonial, patriarchal and anthropocentric worldviews. However, some contemporary cli-fi narratives challenge these paradigms by offering alternative visions that centre climate justice and the voices of those most affected by climate change. In this paper, we examine two contemporary Australian cli-fi narratives — Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book — and their potential role in climate education. Integrating these cli-fi into a cross-disciplinary higher education curriculum can enrich climate change education by encouraging critical, ethical and imaginative engagement and prepare students to navigate and respond to the crisis in transformative ways. Not only do these texts critique
climate inequalities but they imagine alternative ways of being, positioning characters in relational entanglements with climate, cultures and place. We conduct an ecocritical analysis, applying a critical posthumanist and ecofeminist lens, to examine how these narratives disrupt anthropocentric and patriarchal logics and advocate for relational, justice-centred approaches to climate issues. Climate change concepts that emerged from this analysis act as a guide for educators.
Details
- Title
- Cli-Fi as Climate Change Education: A Posthumanist Ecofeminist Approach to Thinking with Australian Cli-Fi Narratives
- Creators
- Chantelle Bayes - Southern Cross UniversityHasti Abbasi - Deakin University (Australia, Geelong)
- Publication Details
- Australian journal of environmental education, Vol.41(3), pp.1-13
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Number of pages
- 13
- Grant note
- Environment and Arts in EducationDeakin Learning Futures
We acknowledge the Countries where this research was written - Naarm and Yugambeh - and the traditional custodians of these places. We acknowledge the support of the Sustainability, Environment and Arts in Education (SEAE) research centre for encouraging arts-based approaches to climate change education. We also acknowledge Deakin Learning Futures for supporting academics with teaching development.
- Identifiers
- 991013311527902368
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2025.
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article