NICLAC – Narratives and Imaginaries of Climate Action

Sous la direction de 

Principal Investigator : Sabrina PARENT (ULB-Philixte -iiTSE-reACT)
Project Contributor : Jade de COCK (ULB-Philixte -CiAsp-iiTSE)
 

Membres de l’équipe

Sebastian DEMOLDER, PhD student (ULB-Philixte-iiTSE) 

Objet de la recherche

As climate change communication based on expository messages, statistical data and arguments have largely failed to elicit significant individual and collective changes, the call for a revival of narrative is now a consensus that is being heeded in mass media outlets. 

Narratives are pivotal to bring about profound societal changes, not because stories raise awareness on certain issues but because they inspire imaginaries of action. Which stories should we tell about climate change to fuel climate action? Addressing this issue requires developing a comprehensive, bottom-up approach to how climate action is driven by narratives.

Articulated in three phases –empirical research (1), close-analysis (2), and theoretical conclusions (3)– this project builds on empirical ecocriticism, an emerging area of research that seeks to integrate environmental humanities and social sciences. (1) Through surveys and interviews, we ask climate activists from Africa and Europe which stories have nurtured their action and how. The first objective is to catalog the cultural artifacts in various media (film, graphic novels, text) from which environmental activists’ imaginaries of climate action are constructed, as well as the different ways these narratives are received and invested by them. (2) We then examine the works themselves to analyze their formal, medial, material characteristics, and shed light on what produces effects. The aim is to map key narrative devices or particular circumstances of reception that build environmental agency. (3) Based on the results of the two empirical axes, the third, theoretical, objective of this project is to clarify the relation between stories, the projected worlds they deploy, and the social imaginaries they constitute. The general ambition of this project is to identify the stories that build collective agency and to reveal how stories impact our ways of caring for and inhabiting our planet. 
 

Organisation d’événements

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Financements

The NICLAC research project received financial support from

• F.R.S-FNRS (PDR 40028811; 2025-2029)
• ULB Research Department (FER 2025-2027)
• Philixte research center 
• and the Interfaculty Institute for Socio-Economic Transformations (iiTSE). 

Publications majeures

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