CANCELLED Sociology for the Climate Crisis: Speculation, Fiction, Futures - Dr Lisa Garforth

Please note that this event has been cancelled due to ongoing strike action at Newcastle University, which has proposed plans to cut 300 jobs, including the threat of compulsory redundancies. We stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Newcastle and encourage anybody who is able to contribute to the local hardship fund.

Join us at this event organised by the Bauman Institute for the School of Sociology and Social Policy seminar series

‘Sociology for the climate crisis: speculation, fiction, futures.’

Dr Lisa Garforth, Newcastle University.

Abstract

Climate change challenges the sociological imagination to adapt to new temporalities, scales, agents, assemblages, affects, anticipations and uncertainties. As sociology seeks to make sense of climate and linked ecosocial crises I want to propose that it becomes more explicitly speculative, perhaps even science fictional. As well as helping us to describe the emergence of a new sociopolitical regime (the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene…), narrative science fiction (SF) can help identify, articulate and amplify forms of social life that would be less extractive, damaging and unfair and more equal, liberatory and sustainable.

The nexus between sociology and the science fictional offers novel insights into social life as it is now and as it might be in possible, probable and desirable futures. Firstly, I reflect on why science fiction should figure prominently as an object of sociological analysis. What can we learn about how people experience and make critical sense of life in technoscientific societies by studying explorations of different possibilties for collective life? What role might readerly pleasures and affects play in a willingness to countenance alternative futures?  Secondly, I suggest that sociology has much to learn from and with SF: from the genre’s distinctive concerns, tropes, icons and figures; but also from the distinctive forms of engagement that SF invites from its readers – engagement that I argue enables the imaginative co-construction of new kinds of livable and lived-in social worlds.

Dr Lisa Garforth lectures in Sociology at Newcastle University on utopia and the sociological imagination. Her research explores environmental futures and future-making discourses in social theory and fiction. Her book Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature was published by Polity in 2017.