The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction

Abstract

In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark’s account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz’s bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism.