Just Futures? Approaching Cultural Clim...

The project responds to calls for more humanities research on climate change and investigates climate modelling beyond the scientific realm. Focussing on the topic of intergenerational justice, it seeks a better understanding of how influential texts and actors imagine the impacts and implications of climate change. 

Its key objectives are: 

1. to investigate how different kinds of texts engage in the cultural modelling of (un)just futures; 

2. to develop an interdisciplinary approach to cultural climate models that will be of wide benefit to researchers. 

The project is framed by interdisciplinary model theory, which conceives of models as representations of reality that reduce complexity and serve specific purposes. Its approach to climate models (1) understands qualitative cultural modelling of climate change as necessary complement to the dominant quantitative scientific climate models, and (2) analyses the intertwining of descriptive and normative components in climate debates. The project group brings together literary studies, linguistics, STS, and literature pedagogy to investigate how different texts move between seemingly neutral climate facts ("models of") and normative social values ("models for"). The sub-projects examine debates of climate change and intergenerational justice in Anglophone dramas and essays (WP 1), in social media (WP 2) and in the reception of literature in criticism and education (WP 3).