Climate Re-Imaginaries — Narratives, Language, and the Imagination
A roundtable on how cultural narratives shape our climate future, with scholars examining why current frameworks breed despair and what might replace them.
Why we picked this
Climate science has the data; what it often lacks is a story people can act on. This roundtable puts three people in a room who have spent their careers working on exactly that problem.
The premise of this roundtable is that the climate crisis is also a crisis of imagination. The panel brings together Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence and UN IPCC Expert Reviewer; Barbara Leckie, author of Climate Change, Interrupted; and filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher, who founded Global Rise: Stories for the Future. Together they examine how existing narratives about climate change, whether of inevitable doom or techno-optimism, can paralyze rather than mobilize.
The conversation treats cultural narratives, language, and the imagination as crucial terrains for confronting climate change, not supplements to policy but preconditions for it. The question driving the session: what alternative frameworks might help people move past despair and into action?
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room. Registration required.