Cultural climate models explore scenarios and engage in ethically charged debates about climate futures. Through a combination of prediction, prescription, and speculation, they foreground aspects of climate change that scientific models tend to elide. They show, for example, how climate change impacts on individuals and their relationships with others, and how it raises complex questions around intergenerational justice.
The Project “Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models“ (CCM) comprises three interlinked work packages. WP1 focuses on the experiential and ethical aspects of climate modelling in literary texts (drama and the personal essay) with particular attention to relationships between parents and children. Key terms emerging from its analysis inform the work of the other two WPs. WP2 combines digital methods, corpus linguistics, multimodal and discourse analysis to investigate the visual and verbal aspects of climate modelling on social media, in relation to topics such as procreation. WP3 focuses on literary reviews and pedagogical texts that engage in what we call ‘critical modelling’: metacommunications about the functions of climate literature between generations. We work closely as a project team across as well as within work packages, ensuring that findings are shared and feed iteratively into subsequent analysis. Further integration is provided by the artistic director, Jasmijn Visser, who documents project research and disseminates it via the virtual exhibition website.
