Workshop med Patricia Wolf & Bryan Yazell

Dette event vil foregå på engelsk

Beyond the Headlines: Crafting Climate Narratives with Flash Fiction

The widespread consensus regarding the harm that climate change will, and already has, inflicted on the planet has not resulted in a mass movement to stop this harm. Among other things, what this situation makes clear is that information alone about climate change is not sufficient for generating action. Instead, apocalyptic headlines might encourage the opposite: a debilitating sense that there is no viable path forward.

This 2-hour workshop takes direct aim at this imaginative problem by asking participants to consider the stories they tell about climate change. Professor Patricia Wolf and Associate Professor Bryan Yazell have spent the last several years co-developing fiction-writing workshops for high school students on Funen, who write short stories that imagine the impact of climate change in the far future. In the workshop, they will relate some of the findings from this research and provide background to the role culture and the arts play in shaping our expectations about the environmental crisis. They will also lead the workshop through a flash-fiction writing exercise that will help clarify for the attendees the narratives they have internalized when it comes to climate change. The answers might surprise you.

BIO

Patricia Wolf is the principal investigator (PI) of PACA (Mobilizing Post-Anthropocentric Climate Action), a research center funded by the SDU Climate Cluster. She is also a Full Professor of Integrative Innovation Management at the Faculty of Social Sciences at SDU. Her main research concerns grassroots, open knowledge-sharing communities which develop solutions to the tackle the climate crisis and considers how universities can mitigate challenges that these groups face.

Bryan Yazell is Co-PI of PACA, and Associate Professor of Anglophone Literature at SDU and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His work is interested in the various ways literature mobilizes us to action, both in historical cases and in the present day. His current project concerns the use of fiction-writing workshops to address problems of “eco-anxiety” in young people. This research is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.