Climatic Change: Storytelling Arts, Zeit

This course brings students from The School of the Arts and The Climate School together to explore new and compelling approaches to navigating climate solutions in the worlds we create and the stories we tell in theater, film, television, digital, visual art, and creative writing. In our current era of rapid change and transformation, artists and environmentalists have an important role to play in grasping the zeitgeist through an integrated lens of science, culture, and imagination. Interdisciplinary collaboration in storytelling can drive feelings of understanding and agency by articulating the massive social changes that are imminent and the emotional uncertainties around climate. There’s a rapidly growing audience for these stories — but there are way too few of them. Delving into key areas of environmental concerns, students will learn how to access and analyze systems of science-based research and innovation, and build new muscles in storytelling, cultural strategies and longterm thinking for a wide range of artistic visions. Arts students will strengthen climate literacy and sciencethinking skills; Climate students will strengthen storytelling skills. We will study the connection between stories and audiences, including multi-cultural perspectives across the platforms where we consume arts and entertainment today. Together we will explore a multitude of narrative structures and styles of storytelling and we will produce fresh thinking for this generation around the role that climate storytelling can play in popular culture and adapting to change. Students will track their evolution of their vision over the span of the course, culminating in Week/Class 11: The Republic of Zeitgeist & Our Future, where students lead and co-teach this class around our collective visions for what our future should be. Students will participate through creative writing assignments, student-led discussions and team exercises, and watching & reading climate content. We will practice collaborative strategies to explore new ways to tell creative and complex human stories in the arts and assess effective ways to shift culture to imagine and adapt to what life on a transformed global scale may become for all of us.