Children of an Earth to come: speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research

Rousell, DS, Cutter-Mackenzie, A and Foster, J (2017) Children of an Earth to come: speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research. Educational Studies, 53 (6). pp. 654-669. ISSN 0305-5698

Preview

Accepted Version Available under License In Copyright. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Over the last three years, the Climate Change and Me project has mapped children and young people’s affective, creative and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers responding to the rapidly changing material conditions of the Anthropocene epoch. In this paper, we position speculative fiction as a mode of creative research which enabled the young researchers to inhabit possible climate change futures. This node of the Climate Change and Me research was initiated by co-author Jasmyne, who at the time was a year seven student at a local high school. Through an ongoing series of visual and textual posts on the project website, Jasmyne created an alternate world in which children develop mutant forces and bodily augmentations that enable them to resist social and environmental injustices. Drawing on these visual and textual entries in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, we consider ways that speculative fiction might offer new conceptual tools for a viral strain of climate change education that proliferates through aesthetic modes of expression.