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A CLiFi Zine Comic Harri’s Guide to Hippiness in Apocalyptic Heat

Part of: Climate Fiction of the Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2025

Claire Bowmer Open the ORCID record for Claire Bowmer [Opens in a new window]
Claire Bowmer*
Affiliation:
Independent Artist and Learning Designer, Adelaide, Australia
*
Email: cebowmer@utas.edu.au
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Abstract

Climate change impacts and stresses young people and although their pro-environmental behaviours have been studied their perspectives have not been widely heard. This creative output is a lo-fi comic engaging with themes of imagined alternative futures in climate fiction. It was constructed to provide an example of a multimodal text with a low barrier to entry for use in the classroom, to complement the study of solar punk texts. The methodology of an autoethnographic art provides a tool for reflection and provides a suitably rebellious outlet for their perspectives, a departure from factual poster assignments on environmental issues. This particular perzine discusses the challenges faced by young people in addressing environmental issues and sustainable practice with limited personal agency.

Keywords

Autoethnographyadolescencearts-basedclimate fictionfuture thinking

Information

Type
Communication
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 41 , Special Issue 3: Climate Fiction of the Anthropocene , July 2025 , pp. 705 - 707
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - SA
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), which permits re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Australian Association for Environmental Education

Practitioner statement

This slice of life perzine was created to model the lo-fi storytelling that can be brought into the classroom (Figure 1). Students can fold a page and use their choice of multimedia expression to tell their story and imagined future. The perzine is inclusive with unlimited communication formats and focus on self-expression (Martin, Reference Martin2020). This activity is designed to build on speculative methods in education discussed by Truman (Reference Truman2023) could provide permission to imagine an alternate future, working.

There is a long tradition of zines in education, (Ross & Pears, Reference Ross and Pears2022). However it is the contention of if it maintains its counter culture integrity when prescribed in an education setting that is the reason that it is well places to support young people in expressing and building their biospheric values. Young people are more responsive when pro-environment behaviours are framed as voluntary and rebellious (van de Wetering et al., Reference van de Wetering, Grapsas, Poorthuis and Thomaes2025). The activity could complement students’ analysis of solar punk texts. This approach could lead to student led conversations about climate (Balundė et al., Reference Balundė, Perlaviciute and Truskauskaitė-Kunevičienė2020).

Figure 1.

Harri’s Guide to Hippiness in Apocalyptic Heat, 2025.

Acknowledgements

None.

Financial support

No funding was received for this project.

Ethical standards

All characters and events depicted are entirely fictitious. Informal concent and ethics processes were used in this authoethnographic research.

Author Biography

Claire Bowmer is an instructional designer and teacher educator. She delivers media and expressive arts workshops for preservice teachers at Flinders University. This has included using zines and reflective art for learning and introducing challenging topics of sustainability. She remains connected to education through delivering creative workshops in schools from nature journaling and sketch note-taking to AI for imagining futures. She shares both her professional design career experience and more illustration practice of telling stories in comics and picture books under Claire Richards. She has volunteered with the SA chapter of Australian Association of Environmental Educators to develop resources linked with art and story telling. Claire has a Master of Education degree and is continuing to study sustainability at UTAS.

References

Balundė, A., Perlaviciute, G., & Truskauskaitė-Kunevičienė, I. (2020). Sustainability in youth: Environmental considerations in adolescence and their relationship to pro-environmental behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 582920. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.582920.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin, B. (2020). Promoting student agency in the middle years classroom through zines. Literacy Learing: The Middle Years, 28(2), 23–28.Google Scholar
Ross, D., & Pears, K. (2022). Zines as Eempowerment. In Proceedings of the 40th ACM international conference on design of communication (SIGDOC ’22) (pp. 117–120). Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3513130.3558987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Truman, S. (2023). Colonial crises of imagination, climate fictions, and english literary education. Research in Education, 117(1), 26–41. DOI: 10.1177/00345237231183343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van de Wetering, J., Grapsas, S., Poorthuis, A., & Thomaes, S. (2025). Promoting adolescents’ pro-environmental behavior: A motive-alignment approach. Journal of Research On Adolescence, 35(1), e13044. DOI: 10.1111/jora.13044.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Figure 0

Figure 1. Harri’s Guide to Hippiness in Apocalyptic Heat, 2025.