Agenda

The webinar is part of the international series "Eco-Justice Series: Interdisciplinary Ecopedagogy Webinars" jointly organized by the University of Graz, Ca' Foscari University and the University of Malaga as part of the Erasmus+ KA2 Ecostories project (Eco-Storytelling: A Digital Toolbox for the English Classroom for Building a Climate-Just Future). For information on the webinar series, see the attached flyer or visit the website https://ecostories.org/news/. To access the webinars, connect to the Zoom link on the attached flyer. Abstract: In our talk, we will critically review and discuss long-standing assumptions about the role of literary narrative in climate change communication and education. We will show that, despite the now widely acknowledged limitations of focussing on information deficits or emotional triggers, much communication and education still centres either on cognition or emotion and thus overlooks the main potentials of literary engagements with climate change and the living world. Briefly discussing select examples and findings from previous and current research projects, we show that, instead of supporting either cognitive or sentimental triggers, literary fiction uniquely engenders an awareness of the discursive and cultured nature of climate change, challenges processes of identification through what we call ‘critical empathy,’ and supports the much-demanded practice of ‘systems thinking’ – the thinking and feeling of complexity and interrelation. Feeding these findings back into communication and education research, and connecting it with findings from the psychology and aesthetics of reading, we outline a pedagogical approach to climate fiction that, rather than instrumentalising it, makes good use of the potential of climate fiction in the classroom and the public. We claim that climate change literacy builds on two interlinked processes of reading, one fast and affective, the other slow and reflective, and thus seek to make a case for “thinking twice” about fiction.
Bio notes of the speakers: Julia Hoydis joined the University of Graz as Full Professor of English Literature in 2024. Her research interests include the history and development of the English novel (from the 18th century to the present), narrative theory, literature and (natural) science, posthumanism and recent digital narrative forms, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism/environmental humanities. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the project "Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models" (2023-2026, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, in collaboration with partners in the UK and Germany), which deals with questions of intergenerational justice and climate futures in various media.
Roman Bartosch is Full Professor of Literatures and Cultures of the Anglophone World and English Language Teaching at the University of Cologne. His recent work focusses on questions of educational philosophy, especially in terms of modelling learning objectives in times of large-scale extinction and climate catastrophe. Building on previous research results, published, together with Julia Hoydis and Jens Martin Gurr, in Climate Change Literacy (Cambridge University Press 2023), he also explores the potentials of “Eco-critical Literacy in Musical and Literary Practices of Arts Education (EcoLIt)” in a BMBF-funded project and together with ethnomusicologists and music educators.