Narrating socio-cultural transitions to a post-fossil society

About Climaginaries

Climaginaries was initiated in 2017 as a FORMAS financed research project. By bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars from Lund, Utrecht, Durham and Warwick Universities with a wide range of practitioners from both the public and private sphere, we explore innovative and creative ways of envisioning how a post-fossil world might look like, and the means through which it can transpire. The idea came as a respons to the fact that the power to enable and govern transition to a post-fossil society not only relies on scientific facts and legislative measures, but also on effectual means to envision post-fossil worlds. Our key mission with this project is therefore to explore the transformative capacity of imaginaries; how compelling narratives are told, and how they can shape and enable efforts to confront climate change. To grasp the transformative capacity of imaginaries we explore how they are produced and performed. Imaginaries based on four broad sites of production, which we call techniques of imagination, will be in focus: Modelling and Scenarios, Experiments, Visions and Pathways and Cultural Representations. Different academic perspectives are brought together to expand the knowledge on how climate imaginaries become effective. Shared interaction and collaborative processes, rather than linear forms of distribution and communication is at the heart of Climaginaries transdisciplinary endeavour. By providing new knowledge on how stories of climate futures circulate, translate and resonate, we aim to leave participants with a new sense of the features that make climate change matter socially and culturally.