Speaker: Emily Strasser, Professor of the Practice, Tufts Department of English
It’s clear that the climate crisis is dire, dramatic changes inevitable and already underway, and action inadequate despite decades of increasingly urgent warnings by climate scientists. Culture plays a critical role in shaping how we receive and respond to information, guiding action on the micro and macro scales. How can stories help us to navigate this changing planet? In this talk, Emily will explore the possibilities that interdisciplinary nonfiction storytelling can offer when just the facts fall short. How can braiding journalism, science, history, memory, and imagination create space for discovering or remembering other ways of being and acting in relationship to the earth? She will draw on her own writing on environmental contamination from nuclear weapons production and emerging work on responses to climate change, as well as examples from other boundary-crossing nonfiction writers.