Is the cold bothering you anyway? How Pop Culture and Science communicate climate change
People all over the world, of every age and background, are not just getting information about climate change from science texts and news. They are getting it from the films they watch, the things they read, the art they like to look at – and it is imperative we harness that narrative power for the planet.
Recently declared a finalist for the Science Engagement (#FallingWallsEngage) category of the #GlobalCall24 of the Falling Walls Foundation, Anna-Sophie Jurgens, the POPSICULE and the students they teach take it upon themselves to ford all the ways – from humour and horror, comics and culture, blockbusters and books, popular film and performance art – pop culture can sound the alarm on the environment and our responsibility to it.
All these projects go beyond just observing and piquing interest. They are actively engaging, bringing unfamiliar audiences in, shaping the conversation and building narrative power. Anna-Sophie expounds:
"Our interest in not only investigating and clarifying environmental phenomena in pop culture and art, but also shaping our discourse about them by collaborating with scientists, artists and creatives, and developing new formats that bring science to life through awe and wonder, art and technology"
Here's a little taste of everything they are doing to tell the story of earth, ice, the people on it, and the science behind them:
| ULTRA PERCEPTION Pop-up ProjectPOPSICULE unlocks the power of the pop-up book! Who knew something often dismissed as a kid's oy could help visualise the potential of synthetic biology to help us think differently about our planet's health? ULTRA-PERCEPTION encourages audiences to take up a new, creative, and active participatory role in the science adventure – to explore new interactive sensibilities, by interacting with three-dimensional science experience first hand.
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| Ice (St)AgesHow do comic book villains, ice skaters, circus performers, disney movies visualise climate change? This project brings together eminent and emerging scholars from science communication, art history, pop cultural studies, environmental studies, sciences studying ice, and artists to explore how arts and aesthetics communicate ice research and the urgency of environmental action.
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Ice as an Agent of Aesthetic Science CommunicationNo time to waste! A new series in the online journal w/k – Between Science and Art, which explores the mediation and generation of environmental knowledge around (the melting of) ice at the interface between art and science.
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Being the Environment: Conveying Environmental Fragility and Sustainability through Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge in Contemporary Aboriginal Science FictionIndigenous Australian fiction texts consider the planet and its non-human inhabitants as having a creative agency and capacity for experience. Co-written by Isabel Richards and Anna-Sophie Jurgens, this article investigates how science-fiction novels by Ambelin Kwaymullinaand Ellen van Neerven’s novella Water empower environmental awareness by conveying the importance of Indigenous biocultural knowledge for resolving twenty-first-century global challenges and western scientific understanding.
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| Street Art, Science & EngagementSome people see graffiti, but some people see so much more – what strategies do street artists use to make people think about the environment? Considering street art as a movement and the culture it originated from, how can we grasp street art as a means of creative grassroots environmental communication and grasping at agency?
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| Far Out SeriesIt's more than a movie – how can environmentally-themed space tropes and figures of thought in art and pop culture transfer moral questions of climate justice and climate awareness to new environments? The Far Out Series publications like "Jellyfish from Outer Space: Tentacular Creatures and Cosmic Responsibility in Environmental Art and Pop Culture", try to answer this. The series particularly looks at media that involves outer space, and how media imagines and communicates these imaginaries.
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Communicating Ice through Popular Art and AestheticsIce is melting, but creatives all over the world are trying to give it a voice, with POPSICULE right there to investigate it all! Communicating with, and about, ice through different media — including art, images and visual fiction — gives ice agency. This video project and publication examines aesthetic strategies and narratives in conveying meaning and awareness around our ice-caps, and how they inspire environmental action and awareness.
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Correcting Critter Miconceptions with ComicsDr Emma Rehn's Science & Humour student project explore comics' as public science communication tools, with the potential to reach people across social media especially. These series of eight standalone comics explore reaching that wide audience, who will not need any prior knowledge of science to understand and learn new facts about animals.
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| Comedy for ConservationClimate change is so important to understand, but far too complex or difficult to understand for many. Emily McKenna's Science & Humour student project is a short nature documentary that explores the impact of climate change on Australian animals, aiming at a broad audience by employing anthropomorphism and wordplay humour.
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| Science & Humour publicationsQuite a few projects are already mentioned above, but students' papers from the Science & Humour Course also tap into different facets of environmental science in different genre and media! Papers produced by students in class often go over the educational role that ecocritical narratives can play, the role of grassroots creativity, and more! To name a few:
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... and more to come!
Can a laugh while you're watching a good movie flare up your relationship with sustainability, without ridiculing the seriousness of climate change?
Stay tuned! POPSICULE is conducting a study on how humour's huge power to engage and drive positive change, specifically in pro-enviromental behaviour. This study will investigate how humour and engagement with the imagination and the experiential and affective inspires environmental awareness.
POPSICULE and several students are also writing different papers that connect environmental science and communication with comic book characters, like Poison Ivy and Swamp Thing.