During the four-day course, we will discuss climate change from several perspectives within environmental humanities. Narrative and rhetorical approaches will be one main focus. Narratives and concepts are heuristic tools which help make sense of reality, of the environment, of the past, the present, and future. But narratives can also create path dependencies and lock-ins, privileging some trajectories, while blocking, or simply effacing others. As such, narratives and concepts play an important role in structuring how people reason and talk about climate change, and in guiding decision making and action – or non-action.
Another main focus will be on temporality and long-term perspectives, including discussions on historicity and futurity as well as historical and archaeological studies. Recent debates on climate change temporality have been concerned with how climate change and the Anthropocene disrupt established conditions for understanding history and reconfigures them by going beyond the timespan of human history. At the same time, translating climatic change into (extreme) weather impacts in order to make sense of long-term statistical trends on the level of lived experience, may lead to a disintegration of the scientific concept of climate itself. In this course we will discuss how multiple temporalities are entwined in various discourses on climate change.
The measuring and calculation of global climate change depends on advanced computing and huge amounts of global scale data. Thus, a major challenge in communicating the severity of climate change to a larger audience is that it is not directly observable. How is it possible to visualize and exhibit such a phenomenon? Exhibitions on topics related to climate change have opened at several major Scandinavian museums, such as The University Museum of Bergen, Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Natural History Museum in Oslo and The Nordic Museum in Stockholm. The course will discuss the challenges concerning exhibiting climate change.
The course will include lectures by prominent scholars in the field, text seminars and workshops, in which the participants’ research materials are discussed. Methods used will be close reading of texts, including field notes, qualitative interviews, media texts, survey discourse and visual representations. To receive the 5 ECTS credits, participants will also have to write a short paper to be handed in approx. a month after the course has ended.
