Climate Festival 2026 - Narrating Planetary Crisis: Storytelling and Resistance in the Anthropocene
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
How can storytelling respond to the vast spatial and temporal scale of planetary ecological crisis?
This interactive session, led by Dr Steve Willey and Dr Harry Acton from Birkbeck's School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, explores narrative as both a literary form and a cultural force. Drawing on key ecocritical thinkers such as Lawrence Buell, Timothy Clark and Donna Haraway, we will consider the challenge narrative faces in addressing the scale of ecological breakdown — and the damaging role familiar stories can play in perpetuating human exceptionalism, extractivism, and myths of endless growth.
Through short extracts from contemporary eco-fiction and creative non-fiction (including Lydia Millet, Richard Powers and others), we will explore how writers are experimenting with perspective, voice and scale in order to reimagine human–nonhuman relations and cultivate ecological awareness.
In the final part of the session, we widen the lens. If narrative shapes fiction and poetry, it also shapes journalism, climate communication, legal argument, policy discourse and activism. What stories about “progress,” “security,” “risk,” or “innovation” structure public responses to climate change? How might alternative framings shift what people feel, think and do?
The session will conclude with a short guided writing exercise offering multiple entry points — creative, critical, persuasive — designed to be useful to participants from across disciplines.
This event also serves as a taster for the MA module Writing the Planet, currently being redeveloped to strengthen its cross-College relevance across Creative Writing, Environmental Humanities, Law, and the Social Sciences.
This event has been designed for in-person attendance. Live streaming will be available for those unable to attend in person, but the facilities in this location are not fully hybrid and so the sound and video quality may be less optimal.
Contact name: External Relations Events
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