11. Imagining future worlds: New ethnographic perspectives on creative approaches to climate change.

Convenors
Lorenzo Domaneschi, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
lorenzo.domaneschi@unimib.it

Lorenzo G. Zaffaroni, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
lorenzo.zaffaroni@unimib.it

In recent years, a new wave of cultural production has emerged to address the global challenges of climate change and shape its public understandings. Environmental movements, young activists, and artists all engage in imagining alternative realities against the backdrop of intensifying eco-anxieties and insufficient collective responses. In this context, artistic and creative interventions are being increasingly invoked due to their power to leverage empathy and provide more «situated» understandings of climate change (Jasanoff, 2010). These emerging imaginaries can intertwine with, support or dispute «official» scientific or political discourses, in ways which are yet to be fully explored. 

Given this background, the panel aims to explore the role of creative practices across various fields – from literature to the visual arts and digital media – in shaping or challenging existing climate imaginaries. Recent theoretical developments devise imagination as an organised cultural practice (Appadurai, 1996) as well as a future-oriented concept (Jasanoff, 2010; Milkoreit, 2017) providing new or alternative solutions to climate-change. In this context, the «speculative» arts are receiving scholarly attention due to their central role in creating alternative but plausible scenarios that tackle contemporary societal issues. For instance, climate-fiction writers provide utopian and dystopian visions that could affect audiences’ understanding of the climate crisis (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018). 

Ethnographers and qualitative researchers have long addressed the relationship between creative practices and society through various approaches (e.g., Bourdieu, 1983; Becker, 2023). Ethnographers of the art and literary world pay particular attention to sense-making practices across different temporal and spatial framings, such as how an artist’s vision is crafted and could «travel» from a field to another to convey aesthetic judgements. Such lens is also particularly fit for analysing the imaginative work that goes into framing and shaping environmental futures (Yusoff, Gabris, 2011), e.g., in addressing the role of «nature», human and non-human agency and sustainability. 

Drawing on this, we suggest taking into account recent advancements in ethnography (Willim, 2017) and discourse analysis (Steiert, 2024) to tackle the situated emergence, circulation and interpretation of social imaginaries. Social imaginaries form the matrix of meaning that guide everyday life (Taylor, 2004), but are also made anew in everyday activities, which should take centre stage in ethnographic observations. Also, social imaginaries do not exist in a vacuum, but are entangled in material arrangements and can be differently deployed by actors holding different resources. In literary works, for example, the affective aspirations invoked by speculative fictions could be addressed by means of new ethnographic paths (Elliott, Culhane, 2017). Lastly, the visual dimension – not only the capacity to create mental images through storytelling (Milkoreit, 2017), but also the (highly mediatised) circulation of visual tropes – can be addressed through virtual ethnography. 

We invite interdisciplinary contributions addressing the above themes through different paths of ethnographic inquiry.

Open Questions:

  • What practices (e.g., forms of agency, conventions, media, socio-technical artifacts, etc.) are deployed by different cultural producers in the production of climate imaginaries? 
  • How can classic approaches from the field of cultural production, art worlds, or the micro-ethnography of creativity be applied to the analysis of climate imaginaries?
  • How do we ethnographically address the emergence and role of discursive practices and their social consequences at the literary, political, or ideological level? 
  • To what extent and with what consequences do climate imaginaries support, reference, or contradict the shared and dominant understanding of climate change? 
  • How do climate imaginaries guide or, conversely, are they influenced by scientific discourse and related research paradigms and models? 
  • How do creative practices related to climate imaginaries inform or challenge current forms of climate activism and public policy?

Keywords
climate change; cultural production; social imaginaries; ethnography; environment; creative industries; climate representations; public discourse.

Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
sociology; anthropology; cultural studies; media studies; environmental humanities; science and technology studies (STS).

References
Appadurai, A.
1996 Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press.

Becker, H. S.
2023 Art worlds: updated and expanded, University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P.
1983 «The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed», in Poetics, 12, 4-5, pp. 311-356.

Jasanoff, S.
2010 «A New Climate for Society», in Theory, Culture & Society, 27, 2–3, pp. 233–253. 

Milkoreit, M.
2017 « Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future», in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 5, 62. 

Schneider-Mayerson, M.
2018 «The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers», in Environmental Humanities, 10, 2, pp. 473–500. 

Steiert, O.
2024 «Declaring crisis? Temporal constructions of climate change on Wikipedia», in Public Understanding of Science.

Taylor, C.
2004 Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press.

Willim, R.
2017 «Evoking imaginaries: Art probing, ethnography and more-than-academic practice», in Sociological Research Online, 22, 4, pp. 208-231.

Yusoff, K., Gabrys, J.
2011 «Climate change and the imagination», in WIREs Climate Change, 2, 4, pp. 516–534. 

Convenors’ bios
Lorenzo Domaneschi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milan-Bicocca, where he teaches Cultural Representations and Practices in Sociology BA Program and Digital Media and Consumption, in Sociology of Organization BA Program. He is a member of the Doctoral College in Intangible Heritage in Socio-Cultural Innovation. He has published articles in national and international journals and monographs on the topics of consumption and cultural production with an ethnographic approach. His latest book is Fare cucina. The culture of food quality between art and craft, published for Carocci (2018).

Lorenzo G. Zaffaroni is a postdoctoral researcher at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. His PhD thesis focused on legitimacy struggles and the categorisation processes operating in the Italian field of art photography. In his previous research experience at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, he focused on the domestication of digital media, privacy, and the social consequences of algorithms in everyday life. At Università Cattolica, he teaches Sociology and Sociology of Media. His latest book is Arte nella fotografia. La legittimazione artistica della fotografia in Italia, published for Vita e Pensiero (2023).