Bonum Certamen

Where can we look for hopeful climate futures, when the global picture seems dominated by inaction or backsliding? While influential nations and international bodies seem adrift, absent, or flatfooted in the face of an accelerating climate emergency, vigorous action is happening at local and regional levels, propelled by coalitions of advocates, researchers, community leaders, and everyday people. In this conversation on the new book Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, we will talk with writers and thinkers from different regions to learn not only about hopeful climate stories and imaginaries but also local resources and efforts on the ground.

Science fiction often concerns itself with grand technological systems and nifty innovations in future worlds far from our own. But the genre can be a full-service “laboratory of the mind,” as useful for imagining alternate social, political, and community structures as for new gadgets. In this conversation, editors of the anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope will join sociologists and futurists to consider the role of social science in science fiction and how researchers, advocates, and policymakers can use fiction to design futures they want to work toward.