Abstract
The scope, urgency, and magnitude of the highly complex and interrelated challenges of global climate, ecological, economic, and social change are the most critical issues currently facing humanity. We are living in the midst of rapid and accelerating change in physical, biological, and societal conditions on multiple spatial and temporal levels (see, e.g., ICSU (2010) Earth System Science for Global Sustainability and Future Earth 2025 Vision). In this article, we will consider what role narratives – especially in the sense of affective communication – can and do play in motivating transformative steps toward sustainability, why substantive collaborations between those engaged in science, art, technology, and humanities are needed to create new visions for and reflections on sustainability, and how the impacts and outcomes of different forms of narrative expression can be assessed to improve our understanding of how knowledge, learning, and societal change are linked (Blackmore et al. 2011).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Benno Werlen for the opportunity to engage in a stimulating workshop on transdisciplinary intercultural ecological research for sustainability (TIERS) in Jena, Germany in June 2012, which contributed to the ideas discussed in this article. I am also very grateful for conversations with Dr. David Tàbara, who enriched my thoughts on narratives.
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Chabay, I. (2015). Narratives for a Sustainable Future: Vision and Motivation for Collective Action. In: Werlen, B. (eds) Global Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16477-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16477-9_3
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