Sociology for the Climate Crisis: Speculation, Fiction, Futures
- Date: Wednesday 19 March 2025, 12:30 – 13:45
- Location: Social Sciences Building, seminar rooms 12.21 and 12.25
- Type: Seminars and lectures
- Cost: Free
In this edition of the SSP School Seminar Series, Dr Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University), considers sociology in relation to the climate crisis.
Dr Lisa Garforth considers the way climate change challenges the sociological imagination to adapt to new temporalities, scales, agents, assemblages, affects, anticipations and uncertainties. As sociology seeks to make sense of climate and linked ecosocial crises, Dr Garforth wants to propose that it becomes more explicitly speculative, perhaps even science fictional. As well as helping us to describe the emergence of a new sociopolitical regime (the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene…), narrative science fiction can help identify, articulate and amplify forms of social life that would be less extractive, damaging and unfair and more equal, liberatory and sustainable.
The nexus between sociology and the science fictional offers novel insights into social life as it is now and as it might be in possible, probable and desirable futures. Firstly, Dr Garforth reflects on why science fiction should figure prominently as an object of sociological analysis. What can we learn about how people experience and make critical sense of life in technoscientific societies by studying explorations of different possibilties for collective life? What role might readerly pleasures and affects play in a willingness to countenance alternative futures? Secondly, Dr Garforth suggests that sociology has much to learn from and with science fiction: from the genre’s distinctive concerns, tropes, icons and figures; but also from the distinctive forms of engagement that science fiction invites from its readers – engagement that she argues enables the imaginative co-construction of new kinds of livable and lived-in social worlds.
This event is in-person and open to all staff and postgraduate researchers. The seminar will take place in 12.21/25 in the Social Sciences building at 12:30 - 13:45 and attendees do not need to register in advance.