Presentation short abstract

The collective fiction and knowledge-ing project 'Future Story' interrogated ‘expert’ knowledges and responses to climate change within care-centred, non-hierarchical spaces, in which critical creative practices were deployed to reimagine researcher-participant power dynamics.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecologists and critical social scientists have emphasised how power dynamics permeate even apparently plural and transdisciplinary climate change research. Established hierarchies of expertise and internalised behaviours can also cause researchers to be complicit in ingraining rather than challenging oppressions and injustices. The pursuit of transformation and justice thus calls for greater levels of reflexivity and critical engagement in climate research. We present a collective fiction and knowledge-ing project Sgeul ri Teachd / Future Story that took place in the islands of Uist in the Scottish Outer Hebrides (UK). Drawing on feminist political ecology, ethics of care and emancipatory pedagogies, this experimental bilingual project emerged in response to questions of identity and community in the face of coastal climate change, as well as global narratives of polycrisis and calls for climate justice. We created care-centred, non-hierarchical spaces that blurred distinctions between facilitator and participant, employing a range of text and visual arts-based activities. These allowed participants to interrogate ‘expert’ ways of knowing and responding to climate change and expand their own situated expertise by engaging with their land, heritage, language as well as ancient premonitions about the future. A collaborative diary supported our critical praxis as researchers, allowing for continuous shared reflection and adaptation. This innovative and experimental methodology made it possible to question knowledge, power and injustices in climate change. In so doing, it revealed how greater critical reflexivity can guide us to ‘do otherwise’ in political ecology and transdisciplinary research.