Scientific reporting

As a backdrop to Cli-Fi, it is necessary to discuss the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, Reference Crutzen and Stoermer2000), a geological epoch that has been slow in the making and a term that describes how Earth has been significantly influenced by human activity. Human extractive processes, which dramatically increased during the 18^th century when fossil fuels were used as an energy resource to power the Industrial Revolution, have led to multiple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and more. The prefix “Anthropos,” the Greek for matters pertaining to man or human being, centralises the human in response to environmental damage, thus reinforcing the anthropocentric logic that contributes to ecological neglect, aiding the separation of human from her worlds. The term succeeded in galvanising global concerns for planetary health, putting climate change into our collective consciousness. From the 1970s onwards, concerns have increased and the number of scientists researching climate has risen exponentially since. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to collate and assess evidence on climate change and has published six assessment reports, the most recent one published in 2023. The reports have suggested that the “global temperatures have risen by more than 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level” (CS3, 2024).

Climate change education (CCE) and research

Responding to an anthropogenic climate changing Earth requires education to make a cultural shift, one that reconfigures “the overall habitus embedded in education vis a vis the wider society, biodiversity, and society futures” (Irwin, Reference Irwin2019, p. 494). Changes in climate call for education to reconsider, what future/s are we preparing students for? How might we prepare them for this? And, which approaches to educational research and practice might help us all to navigate so much uncertainty? These questions are challenging for teachers and schools to answer since they “challenge our known way of doing things” and most of us “are ill equipped to properly think it through or instigate constructive changes” (Irwin, Reference Irwin2019, p. 493). However, we wonder whether the questions that we should ask are not just about educational futures but also about educational pasts and presents that are co-constituted by shared worlds. To help more response-able everyday choices, educational spaces should enable ways for children and young people to speculate about uncertain futures and live in response-able presents.

Climate change education (CCE) is one such response for schools. As an emerging field of practice and research, CCE employs innovative pedagogical approaches that help children and young people grapple with the uncertainties of climate change brought forth by generational injustices (Cutter-Mackenzie & Rousell, Reference Cutter-Mackenzie and Rousell2019). CCE seeks to quell agitations towards precarious futures and prepare future generations for surviving and thriving in hotter/wetter/drier worlds, but it has largely focused on delivering scientific knowledge about climate change. Through erring on protectionist, operationalised measures that the human can control, such as capturing animals for observational scrutiny, measuring the weather via temperature, implementing solar panels and water conservation projects. The hope is that this will encourage behaviour change but studies have found that this is not the case (Cutter-Mackenzie & Rousell, Reference Cutter-Mackenzie and Rousell2019) and arguably, galvanises anthropocentric behaviours. Instead, a focus on relationships within, between, amongst interconnected more-than-human worlds may do more to bring children and young people into closer relations with climate issues. CCE has, therefore, ignited conversational storms about how education and schools can enact a pedagogical approach that harmonises the consumption of scientific knowledge with the co-creation of more-than-human relationships. With this, CCE needs to also strike a delicate balance between articulating the climate change urgency whilst also supporting escalating levels of eco-anxiety.

To reconsider education’s anthropocentric praxis, where schools build physical and metaphorical walls and doors to separate children from the world/s around them, we orientate our education research. Both of our inquiries are situated in spaces where climate and more-than-human encounters are possible. Charlotte’s inquiry in a school without walls in a jungle in Bali and Hannah’s in an early childhood forest school setting in an urban park in London challenge natureculture binaries that are imbued throughout our educational systems, such as indoor-outdoor, learner-teacher, adult-child, animate-inanimate (Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2025). In response to human-centric, scientific approaches to climate change and sustainability education, we advocate for messy, arts-based practices, research and pedagogies (Hogarth & Hankin, Reference Hogarth and Hankin2024). These pedagogies create spaces for children and young people to co-produce knowledge with more-than-humans. We argue that these approaches help to bridge gaps between humans and others, deepening relationships and exploring climate change in more expansive and situated ways. Our approach to Posthumanist-Cli-Fi contributes to the growing field of CCE to explore speculative futures in creative ways, challenging anthropocentric attitudes and behaviours within more-than-human worlds. In the next section, we discuss Climate Fiction as a genre, considering how and why it emerged, its growing popularity and the possibilities it offers for educational research and practice.

Climate fiction (Cli-Fi)

Inspired by the 2006 IPCC, Bloom (2008) framed Cli-Fi as a distinct genre to focus on human and ecological responses to climate disruption. He began “thinking of ways to raise awareness of novels and movies about climate change issues” (Wright, Reference Wright, Baumbach and Neumann2019, p. 100) and after a sustained media blitz, the term entered our academic and journalistic lexicons. Since then, the rise in popularity of the genre (Fernandes, Reference Fernandes2016) is “unsurprising given our growing awareness of the ways that our actions are impacting the planet and given the increase in speculative fiction about the possible end results of unchecked human activity” (Wright, Reference Wright, Baumbach and Neumann2019, p. 100).

Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) emerges from “an anxious now” and “unspools an imagined and endangered future” (Hennessy et al., Reference Hennessy, Cothren and Matthews2022, p. 1). It is a loose and emergent genre that responds to the urgency of the climate crises by narrating imagined, speculative and fictional past present futures within climate changing worlds. Cli-Fi describes “an already significant body of narrative work broadly defined by its thematic focus on climate change and the political, social, psychological, and ethical issues associated with it” (Goodbody & Johns-Putra, Reference Goodbody and Johns-Putra2019, pp. 1–2). However, there are ongoing debates about the Cli-Fi “genre” including about its purpose (does it need to be didactic?), its definition (is it possible to define?), its focus (should it include explicit reference to climate change?) and its potential (can it change attitudes, behaviours, relationships?). Cli-FI is also multimodal and transdisciplinary with literary, multimedia, academic, educational and arts-based approaches all engaging with the genre.

Cli-Fi is deeply grounded in the embodied and material experience of climate change. For this reason, Cli-Fi often depicts dystopian, masculine, violent and apocalyptic speculative scenarios, focusing on human survival on planet Earth. In these imaginaries, the protagonist is either human, part-human or has human qualities, sometimes presented as an expert in control, capable of battling, escaping, casting spells, creating innovations and carrying out experiments to mitigate devastation and save human civilisation. “Nature” “plays a major role in these narratives, as a ubiquitous and overwhelming danger for humanity” (Gebauer, Reference Gebauer2022, p. 104), presented as something to be feared; a force outside; a separate entity, where the white, wealthy human is special and under threat from external forces that he struggles to master or tame. This reinforces a nature/culture binary and anthropocentric notions whereby the human is depicted as all-powerful and resilient, even in face of extreme environmental disasters. Furthermore, this contributes to an ongoing dismissal and erasure of previous and ongoing injustices involving Indigenous rights, biodiversity loss, species extinction, social injustices and more. There is a correlation, therefore between climate change reporting and Cli-Fi storying that demonstrates our (human) limitations with and as the world. According to Truman (Reference Truman2023, p. 27), this also correlates with “a colonial crisis of imagination,” perpetuating continuous cross-industry feedback loops of anthropocentric, extractive thought and action, confronting us with some ponderings: How do we come to terms with our inseparable vulnerabilities with the natural world and all her inhabitants? How might we think/feel/do differently to respond with the urgent demands of reconciling our climate changing futures with multiple others?

In other Cli-Fi imaginaries, the human is presented as vulnerable, exasperated, apathetic and questioning how things were ever allowed to become so dire. The destruction and degradation of Earth is often set in a post-apocalyptic setting where there is oppressive rule (for humans) and a search for accountability.

The assumption is that the world will die with humans, as it exists in an abandoned state due to environmental issues such as extreme pollution and heat. To respond, humans often survive in controlled, artificial environments such as spaceships or underground bunkers, yearning for better lives through a rediscovery of human connection with the natural world and its climate.

In other notable Cli-Fi depictions, climate change is presented as a systemic predicament where the human has clear choices about how to respond and how to care. In these examples, humans recognise the need for humanity to come together, recognising the dark situations they face and appealing to one another for solutions—not just for a few but for everyone on the planet.

Alternative approaches in Cli-Fi

The critique of the often anthropocentric, dystopian focus of Cli-Fi has widened but there are alternative approaches. Indigenous scholars have written what we have come to know as “Cli-Fi” for millennia and write about living-with changing climates. Isaacs, cited in Phillips et al. (Reference Phillips, McLean Davies and Truman2022, p. 172), has said, “all Indigenous literature is climate literature.” Indeed, Truman notes that “anti-colonial and Indigenous authors around the world have been writing about the relationship between extraction, capitalism, and climate for a long time” (Reference Truman2023, p. 36). In recent times, there has been a rise in Cli-Fi creations that offer broader depictions of climate change as an interconnected issue for all life on Earth. Relational ontologies such as posthumanism and agential realism, along with the animal and plant turns, trouble anthropocentric, positivist accounts of Cli-Fi and education for more-than-human knowledge-making. Caracciolo et al. (Reference Caracciolo, Ferebee, Toivonen, Ulstein and Lambert2022, p. 18) explored posthumanist framings of Cli-Fi literature and considered how they “push us beyond familiar forms of thinking and storying climate change” by suggesting ways we might create narratives with more-than-humans. This not only includes multiple others but presents them as valuable and worthy to plot and structure, offering more promising steps towards shaping our collective imaginations for healthier futures.

We draw on these relational ontologies to create our Posthumanist-Cli-Fi, and in the following section, we introduce our theoretical and conceptual toolkit to explore how we might co-create practice-as-research in climate-induced storms. Our intention with this paper, therefore, becomes broadly threefold: 1) to expand the genre of Cli-Fi to co-create writing with more-than-human voices; 2) to develop practice-as-research writings as a creative, generative response to climate change; 3) to utilise these emergent practices and co-produced knowledges as a pedagogical approach to widen the speculative field of CCE and educational futures.

Practice 1: Exploring differences as an act of care and curiosity

One of the most well-known examples of practice-as-research with another species is Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2008) exploration of her shared worlds with Cayenne, her dog, who “make each up in the flesh” (16). Haraway writes about their intimate and entangled relationship, declaring that they are “significantly other to each other in specific difference” (16). It is in their differences where Haraway finds “a provocation to curiosity” (7), a game of “response and respect” where “learning to pay attention” (19) is all “part of training each other in acts of communication we barely understand” (17). With her practice-as-research with dogs and other animals, Haraway (Reference Haraway2015) builds on Despret’s (Reference Despret2016) research with birds to propose “a curious practice,” an inquiry approach that requires the researcher to hone an attentive, sensitive and curious approach to the world around. This involves “going visiting” and “demands the ability to find others actively interesting” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2015, p. 5). A curious practice outlines how a researcher might gain greater comfortability with all that is unknown, unplanned, unpredictable when inquiring-with animals, to be open to taking “off-the-beaten practices” and “to retune one’s ability to sense and respond–and to do all this politely!” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2015, p. 6).

To work with a curious practice and be responsive “in the moment,” Tsing (Reference Tsing2015) offers further guidance through her explorations with matsutake mushrooms. She advocates for inquiry that nurtures “the art of noticing,” which involves paying “attention to mushroom picking. Not that it will save us—but it might open our imaginations” (19). Tsing posits that capitalist obsessions with progress, development and scalability have removed our abilities to notice more-than-human worlds, and in doing so, we are failing to understand that “these livelihoods make worlds too—and they show us how to look around rather than ahead” (22). Noticing differences through sensory activations illuminates how we are sharing moments with more-than-humans. These noticings are a critical approach when engaging in practice-as-research, not to create divides but to “give substance to noticing” because otherwise, “we are left imagining that all trees, or Asians, look alike” (293).

Similarly, van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster (Reference Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p. 8) suggest we learn how to “cultivate the art of attentiveness” when exploring differences with more-than-humans by “being in the field.” They discuss a distinction between “noticing” and “attentiveness,” the latter taking on a “passionate immersion” with “distinctive experiential worlds, modes of being, and biocultural attachments of other species” (6). This passionate immersion requires a researcher to become sensorially affected by the encounter when engaging in practice-as-research. Noticing these senses helps move “beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans” (6). With this, a researcher can then give “careful attention to what matters to them—attention to how they craft shared lives and worlds” (6).

A final approach that a researcher could employ to explore differences is a “deep hanging out” (Somerville & Powell, Reference Somerville and Powell2019). With this approach to inquiry, “Everything, especially the very mundane and every day, is regarded as fascinating and thought provoking” (829), which is essential for practice-as-research. Drawing on their research in preschool settings, Somerville and Powell (Reference Somerville and Powell2019) spend a lot of time without purpose, sitting alone, playing with mud and children, responding to play invitations and having conversations. This approach enables the researcher to focus on being present with more-than-human research participants and that afterwards, researchers have conversations to “talk through our experiences and wonderings, at the very limits of language, in our struggle to find words to attach to what this might mean in, and for, the world” (830). These conversations would be accompanied by journal notes, photographs, an exploration of embodied experiences and any materials from the research site, such as leaves, twigs and even mud. This collapses the idea that “data” is produced in “real-time” with participants, but instead, it proliferates “after” the research event.

Practice 2: Reducing the space between “us”

Despite acknowledging and recognising differences as discussed in Practice 1, it is also important to find likenesses. These are complementary, relational practices, not binaries in competition with one another, but placing difference and likeness in conversation.

Rautio (Reference Rautio2017) demonstrates how to notice similarities within and across more-than-human relationships with birds as co-authors. Together, they inquire into the concept of multiple species, as “a deconstruction and a reconsideration of life divided by species lines (94).” Rautio (90) argues that when we form relations with persons, we “look for characteristics that we share, recognise and/or value.” This prompts researchers to consider likenesses with other species, as a response to one another and the environments they share, not as a fixed entities and separated categories. Rautio expands (90) how this might be enacted, as “a question of simple reframing. What if you defined who counts as your family by including all who eat from the same fridge?” Exploring likenesses is one way to mitigate distances between species, to build relationships from a position of openness, togetherness and generosity as opposed to categorisation, division and exclusion.

Similarly, Abram (Reference Abram2010, p. 46) writes how “the things of the world have a great deal more in common with us than we tend to allow.” To explore these commonalities, Abram (Reference Abram2010, p. 58) suggests that we start with “rendering ourselves vulnerable” to “the sensuous world,” to open ourselves to acts of reciprocity, which helps us explore ongoing exchanges, such as “exploring moss with our fingers while feeling the moss touching us back.” This kind of sensory attunement is what helps us to bridge divides that have been previously created by humanistic hubris, creating, instead, a likeness and closeness between more-than-humans. Kimmerer works with this bridge as a Potawatomi botanist, writer and professor known for weaving Indigenous knowledge with Western science. She sees touch as a relational act, a way of knowing between human and more-than-human:

Practice 3: Attending to the distributed agency of the assemblage

Practice-as-research provides opportunities to create-with more-than-humans so that human-centred ways of knowing do not dominate research. Attuning-with more-than-human voices as distributed agency of an assemblage (Bennett, Reference Bennett2010) helps us to conceptualise this.

Nordstrom, Nordstrom and Nordstrom (Reference Nordstrom, Nordstrom and Nordstrom2020) provide an example of how to create-with Amelie and Coonan, her domesticated cats, as a multispecies assemblage to explore the death of Amelie. Notably, Amelie and Coonan are credited as co-authors of this research, formally recognised as worthy contributors. In this multispecies narrative, the paper explores how they “tune and tend each other in our rhythmic practices of living–dying together” (1236), considering the different ways in which they listen, communicate and become-with beyond human voice and words. Nordstrom et al. (Reference Nordstrom, Nordstrom and Nordstrom2020) co-write in ways that do not centre any singular being in their multispecies life, acknowledging how “human-centered narratives forget the response-abilities we have to each other, humans and nonhumans alike.” Instead, they write a “kin story” (1239) together, “a passionate, vulnerable, and evocative narrative ‘that’ allow us to think our lives differently” (1239). This multispecies (writing) inquiry shares concerns for the ways that human language inescapably carries a “human-centered Cartesian framework,” which can “cage our bodies” in practice-as-research “that seeks to uphold the hierarchy that our daily lives subvert” (1239).

Of course, the human writer can never know what it is like to live as a cat or any other species, since “We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom (Abram, Reference Abram2010, p. 129).” A researcher will, therefore, need to attend and respond with humility to the needs, interests and appreciations of the more-than-human assemblages and not just the human—this is no easy task for the anthropocentric amongst us, who enjoys visibility and special treatment. Asking questions helps to explore these shared worlds, considering how they “mean both asking what another finds intriguing and also how learning to engage that changes everybody in unforeseeable ways” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2015, 6, emphasis in original). With creative writing as an approach to practice-as-research with other species, a researcher is compelled to write at the edges of their imaginations, employing the power of language to “speculatively write riddles of between spaces without clear answers and incite possibilities of futures to come” (Nordstrom et al., Reference Nordstrom, Nordstrom and Nordstrom2020, p. 1239). Speculative fabulations “stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p. 136). This practice, therefore, generates alternative ideas, opinions and affects that enable the creation of new more-than-human possibilities. As discussed by de Freitas and Truman (Reference De Freitas and Truman2021) speculative fabulation “can spur us on to act with more-than-human sympathy in posthuman ecologies that demand a pluralist and plastic sense of worldly belonging” (531). This is the response-ability that we argue Posthumanist-Cli-Fi can expand.

Practice 4: Becoming-animal through creative writing

In this practice-as-research, we gather philosophers and writers who have storied through animal writings, philosophising what it means to be animal, to be humananimal and to write with animals. We draw on Practice 3 by discussing creative writing as a specific process for becoming-with and for “becoming-animal” (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987).

Reinhold (Reference Reinhold2018) draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal to explore how to create “animal writing” with a bear. Instead of writing mainstream academic texts that “almost automatically excludes the feminine, the animal, the dirty, the child,” Reinhold (Reference Reinhold2018, p. 319) calls for researchers to attend to “the leaky, the weak, the hesitating or dancing body” to create academic texts that are “powerful,” aligning well with the diminished voices of climate change that Posthumanist-Cli-Fi seeks to elevate. Animal writing involves “feminine writing, dirty writing or interruptive writing” (328) that does not attempt to tidy nor satisfy its forms for the reader. Rather, it “does not necessarily need to rely only on animals to reach convincing effects but it has to engage with them sensually, which is very different from simply acknowledging of their presence” (328). Animal writing, therefore, works with approaches in Practice 1 to go beyond rational thinking to create knowledge that includes “shouting, fleeting, scratching, finding a voice for animals living inside us” (328). To enact this style, the researcher is encouraged to think beyond words and instead with smells, tastes, colours and even “traces on the ground” (322), blurring their words, creating confusions with/out punctuation, utilising unexpected word combinations and nonsense words—all designed to create more questions, rather than clarity. Creating animal writing can be a challenging endeavour for the reader-writer relationship, especially an anthropocentric one, since it may be impossible to reach a “full” understanding of it. This is the humility that is required when decentering human perceptions and responding with shared worlds.