PACA Post#2

October 2024

Dear PACA subscribers  

Fall is upon us. And while considering the reasons behind what seems to be the end of a particularly long Indian summer in and around the PACA residence, this PACA Post circles around the topics of imaginaries and narratives.

Why are narratives important? In the second episode of the PACA Biopic, we explain that proper climate action is usually narrated as a future of scarcity. A future of what we will lose. A future of self-sacrifice. Our argument is that we need a different and more positive narrative. Fortunately, such narratives are already blossoming in a myriad of civil society and grass roots initiatives in which alternative futures are imagined and enacted. 

Engage

• Join us at the PACA Reading Circle Earthcare. This fall we are reading Stefania Barcas newly published book Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction inthe Age of Climate Change.

• The PACA Cinema hosts film screenings of documentaries and fiction films that address human-nature relations in the Anthropocene. Join us at SDU’s Campus in Odense one Thursday per month where we stream and discuss the movies.

•   October 10th: Tomorrow 

•   November 7th: Utama

•   December 5th: Princess Mononoke

• Call for abstracts for the Conference on the Social Impact of Climate Fiction: A Cross Disciplinary Conference (CFP). About the Conference: Rather than repeat calls for more and better representations of climate change in fiction, this conference takes stock of the most recent innovations in eco-storytelling and asks: how should the urgency of the climate crisis (and the resulting call to action) affect our expectations from, and experience of, reading literature today? And what evidence emerges for fiction’s capacity to inspire greater ecological awareness?

• Please submit your 250-word abstract for 20-min presentations and a short bio to clifi.conference@gmail.com by November 1, 2024.

• Join the CUHRE/PACA collaborative Cli-Fi in the Classroom, a seminar that aims at uniting, strengthening, and developing the work being done on ecological literacy in upper secondary education.

• For other activities this fall see www.sdu.dk/paca  

Concept Quest: Imaginaries and Narratives 
As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh has famously argued, the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Our society often lacks the tools to fully understand this crisis and its historical roots, to question the individual and collective behaviors that continue to worsen it, and to take action to build alternative futures. That’s why so much of the work we do at PACA revolves around narratives and imaginaries. As Donna Haraway has said, it “matters what stories tell stories”. In order to plan effective climate action, we need to analyze the narratives that define our attachment to capitalist modernity and its addictive “pleasures,” starting from our dependency on fossil fuels. At the same time, we need to pay attention to marginalized voices and the various actors that are already at work to shift our shared values and institutions away from the unjust, exploitative practices of today. By doing so, we contribute to a distinctly utopian project: one that not only envisions a desirable future but also recognizes where the roots of this future might already exist in the present. 

PACA Diaries: Burning Man 
This summer, PACA sent a research delegation to Black Rock City in the Nevada desert to contribute to Burning Man, an event whose focus on building a radically alternative society can inform and guide PACA’s quest for a post-anthropocentric narrative. The community around Burning Man is a global cultural movement guided by principles that, among other things, stress inclusion, decommodification, and collective stewardship of the environment. The research project was centered around two workshops of flash fiction writing and improvisation theatre aimed at creating and enacting positive post-anthropocentric climate narratives together with the audience. The long-standing “Burners Without Borders” camp hosted the team and the two workshop sessions. A report of the findings will be published in the fall.   

Through the eyes of the the PACA mascot
I was lucky enough to get a free rider ticket to this years’ Burning Man. And while I’m still recovering from the dessert, I’m curing my festival blues immersing myself in the newest edition to the PACA Library, the book Once Upon a Time in the Dust: Burning Man Around the World - a gift we received in Black Rock Dessert - and listening to the soundtrack from our Burning Man Workshop "Enacting hopeful climate futures" 

News

• The project “Farmers Pasts and Futures in Europe: Memory, Subjectivity, and Resistance” started this month. With the project, the researchers aim to develop and test a workshop that bring together urban dwellers, rural people, and sustainability advocates in the effort to find a common path to more sustainable rural communities. Read more here.
• Søren Askegaard has together with co-writers (Rémy, Roux, Arnould, Askegaard, Beudaert, Galuzzo, Giannelloni & Marion) won the price Prix Académique de la Recherche en Management for the article: “Look Up! Cinq propositions de recherche pour repenser le marketing dans une société post-croissance. Accessible in English online: Look up! Five research proposals for rethinking marketing in a post-growth society
• At the 25th Conference of the Continous Innovation Network (CiNet) in September, we addressed how environmental organizations are innovating their communications strategies to mass mobilize innovative climate action among their members. Reach out to paca@sdu.dk to get a copy of the paper 
• We have received a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, which will fund the Conference on the Social Impact of Climate Fiction: A Cross Disciplinary Conference in may 2025.

Recent publications

• Mass-Mobilizing Innovative Climate Action: Responsible Innovation Strategies of Environmental Organizations (Conference Paper)
• Post-Anthropocentric Transformations of Consumption in the Anthropocene: Beyond the Nature-Culture Divide
• Introduction: Science and Politics in an Age of Climate Breakdown
• Det metafysiske, det sanselige og det etiske: Nye naturforståelser hos Schelling, Humboldt og Günderrode
• Kommunocæn? Et kritisk blik på posthumanismen
• Marx og modvækst 

PACA recommends…
Follow the process of artist and writer Lucy Neal in this Dark Mountain Essay, as she imagines ways to recognize the Rights of Nature through a performance of a court-proceeding set in the year 2030.

A true gem in the podcast jungle, the Memory Palace is a podcast created and produced by Nate DiMeo of beautifully written, short, narrative essays put to music. These Fifty Words Written After Learning The Arctic Bowhead Whale Can Live up to Two Hundred Years is a 1:28 minute palate cleanser worth your while. 

Thanks for spending some time with the PACA Post.  

Sincerely,
The PACA-team

If you want to strike up a conversation reach out at paca@sdu.dk, the register for our newsletter or find us on Instagram @pacaclimateaction .