When academic and cli-fi expert Casper Bruun Jensen sat down to write a paper titled "Cli-fi, Education and Speculative Futures" for the "Comparative Education" journal, he started off with three interesting quotes:
* “Asked my 17 year old about the OK Boomer discourse. “yeah, my entire generation is going to die on an uninhabitable planet, but sure, their feelings about a meme are super important to me” [Tweet by @BethLynch2020, November 8, 2019].
* “The University of Southern Denmark [SDU] wants to be Denmark’s first sustainable university” [headline in the newspaper Politiken, June 23, 2019].
* “SDU’s new policy is going to fit the truth to management by world goals.” [Tweet by Danish education researcher in response to SDU’s new strategy, August 11, 2019].
Then he explained why he started off that way, writing:
''These discrepant expressions tie together two questions “What kind of world are we going to live in?” and “How do educational institutions need to respond?” They do so via the vector of climate change. Since the latter is unknown in its specific effects, though not in general trajectory, a space is opened for speculation about futures. This opening speaks to the increasing relevance of the swiftly ascending genre of cli-fi for social research.''
Dr Jensen added: "It is not fortuitous that cutting-edge social science (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016; Yusoff 2018) increasingly turn to cli-fi (and indigenous science fiction (e.g. Dillon 2012)) for conceptual resources adequate to Anthropocene threats. A recent special issue of the anthropological open-access journal NatureCulture was dedicated to “thinking across worlds” (Jensen and Kemiksiz 2019). Given that “thinking across” is also the remit of comparative education, it is worth pondering what a similar imaginative leap might mean for this field.''
Dr Jensen goes on:
"Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (1996) follow the journey of young hyper-empathic woman, Olamina, as she attempts to establish a new community, Earthseed, in a California environmentally devastated and taken over by violent right-wing militias. Nora Jemisin’s (2015-17) ''Broken Earth'' trilogy depicts the complex socio-geological situation of the “Stillness.” Unpredictably ravaged by catastrophic geological events, this supercontinent is inhabited by various castes, some of them (“orogenes”) with the power to control energy and mitigate or intensify the disruptions. Published two decades apart, both offer powerful testimony to the political, social, economic, racial, and gendered consequences of living in highly unstable environments. Neither speaks “directly” to the present planetary situation of accelerating climate change, though Butler’s Parables appear prophetic in several respects. Yet, both offer imaginative templates for grappling with current challenges.
''Cli-fi works are not always entirely dystopic," Jensen notes. "Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) chronicles unfolding events around a threatened population of Monarch butterflies in rural Kentucky, and the changing relations between local people and visiting scientists attempting to discern the cause of the problems. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels develop quasi-utopian solutions to the environmental, economic, and political conundrums facing communities—from Mars (1992-6) to New York (2017) (see also Kemiksiz and Jensen 2019). Yet, despite the fact that cli-fi is often perceived as provocative and insightful, it has proven more difficult to imagine just how it might inform or reshape social research agendas. ''
''In a recent article (2018),"Jensen adds: "I explored the speculative potentials of analyzing cli-fi literature (Paolo Bacigalupi’s (2009) The Wind-Up Girl, which takes place in a severely disrupted future Bangkok) alongside, or on the same plane as, actually unfolding climate change in the Mekong region. By describing these settings as mixing in a Deleuzian “zone of indiscernibility,” I attempted to highlight the disturbing continuities between the slowly emerging effects of climate change today, and the violent disruptions of the (imagined but not unlikely) future. It is, of course, not given that such continuities will come to pass. However, by vividly articulating the virtual consequences of crossing catastrophic thresholds, cli-fi authors push us also to speculate about what it will take to prevent us from getting there; how we might (perhaps) still embark on a route towards alternative futures, climatic and educational."
"Cli-fi, then, confronts us with the difficult collective question of how to modify our thought collectives and thought styles (Fleck 1979 [1935]) in ways adequate to the cosmopolitical perplexities, tensions and threats emerging in tandem with the accelerating Anthropocene. We sorely need fresh ways of thinking and living with a new, changing Earth," he wrote.
Going back to the beginning of his paper (and this blog post), Dr Jensen wrote: "To return to the tweets with which I began, it may be that the University of Southern Denmark’s new strategic orientation to the UN sustainability goals is problematic. But the critical scenography is changing. To the educational critic scandalized by the very idea that sustainability might become a 21st Century university’s guiding value, we might simply respond “OK Boomer.” For the central problem today is not that taking climate change seriously poses a (fictive, imagined) threat to truth, enlightenment, or free inquiry. It is, rather, that the University’s commitment—though certainly far better than nothing—is still much too vague and fuzzy; woefully inadequate to the looming threat so clearly articulated in the teenage tweet. Who cares whether educational visions are based on Kantian enlightenment or UN’s sustainability goals? What, indeed, does it matter that PISA tests and the reflections of the Frankfurt school go down the same drain, if “my entire generation is going to die on an uninhabitable planet” anyway? ''
''Generation Z is hopefully not going to go extinct but there is little doubt that massive demographic, economic, social, and political consequences will accompany accelerating climate change," Jensen notes: "Cli-fi, of course, cannot rescue us. It can, however, help us to speculatively sharpen the stakes and imagine the range of possible consequences and responses. Institutional and curricular transformations at all levels, for example, are urgently needed. But what forms would they take?"
''It is worth checking Bacigalupi, Jemisin or Atwood to imagine not only what might be in store for us but also how institutions capable of dealing with such events would have to change and adapt," Professor Jensen writes: "Cross-cutting, transdisciplinary forms of critical-constructive thinking, spanning everything from ecology and anthropology to education and geology will surely be needed to tackle emerging problems. But what will these problems look like, and what forms should such pedagogies take? Why not look to Butler, Robinson or Le Guin for guidance and inspiration about new themes, speculative questions, and fresh hypotheses? In the Anthropocene, the importance of alternative futures will continue to grow. Speculative fiction leads the way. ''
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