• Leuphana
• Research Centers
• Centre for Digital Cultures
• Events
• Current Activities
• Co-creating Climate Futures Through Creative Communication and Collaboration

Co-creating Climate Futures Through Creative Communication and Collaboration

2025-05-13 13.05.2025, 14:00-16:00, C40.256 & ZOOM, Climate Futures Talk with Julie Doyle (University of Brighton)

Creating equitable climatefutures requires cultivating collective imaginaries and narratives that go beyond the socio-cultural-technological conditions of the present to offer socially transformative visions. Yet such envisionings also require being attentive to how current intersecting systems circumscribe these imaginings. As a discipline that focuses upon the communicative dimensions of climate change as constitutive of climate knowledge and action, climatecommunication scholars play a crucial role in this process. Yet moving from critical reflection on existing climatecommunication, to active creation of new climate narratives requires working across disciplines and practices. As Haraway puts it, in order to deal with the messy entanglements of our troubled times, “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations.” (Haraway 2016, 4). This presentation will explore how the epistemological approaches of climatecommunication can be brought in conversation with the disciplines and practices of art, science and education to co-create communication about climatefutures. Central, is the importance of the processes of participation andcollaboration in creating new narratives. To illustrate, the presentation will discuss a number of creativeclimatecommunication projects with young people in the UK and Europe that I have been involved in (Doyle 2020, Doyle et al 2024; System Change Hive 2019), exploring both the possibilities and challenges of collaborative working in the fostering of climatefutures in the present.

Julie Doyle is a Professor of Media andCommunication in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, UK. Over the last two decades, Julie’s research has examined the role of media, (visual) communicationand popular culture in shaping societal understandings of and responses to climate change. Author of Mediating Climate Change (Routledge, 2011/2016,) her research has been cited in the UN’s IPCC Scientific Assessment Reports (2018, 2022). Julie also works collaboratively with artists and young people to co-create climatecommunication, and has provided consultancy on climatecommunication to government, NGOs and business.