The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction

Abstract

In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark’s account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz’s bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism.

Livet från den ljusa sidan

“…Alternativa framtider har studerats genom klimatfiktion, en subgenre till science fiction där klimatförändringarnas katastrofala konsekvenser är det mest centrala (Alacovska & Holt 2023;Mayer 2014;Milkoreit 2017). Den här artikeln bidrar med ny kunskap genom att fokusera på föreställningar om hur det skulle vara att leva i ett nedväxtsamhälle -inte utifrån fiktiva berättelser, som i klimatfiktionen, utan med utgångspunkt i befintlig forskningslitteratur.…”