The climate emergency poses a crisis of imagination, which poses a crisis for action. The problem is that the dominant imaginaries of stability, rescue and doom fail to empower communities to develop forms of life capable of ethically sustaining themselves and beings other than humans as destabilisations intensify. A fourth imaginary, one holding out the possibility of relational, community-building and ethical forms of life under radically climate-changed conditions is, however, already incipient in the work of communities creating different sustainabilities, systems and material flows.
Working across three sites in Australia and India, this project will amplify these grounded and transformative imaginaries; network communities involved in transformative action and enhance their capacity to communicate the systematic character of their approaches, and equip people to develop community-led systemic responses and produce effective communications about transformative projects. Fieldwork will draw out narratives about communities’ practices and the processes they have undergone to develop, sustain and adapt them. Working with communities and youth fellows, the project will produce stories via short films, community radio, artwork and written narrative. It will disseminate them across traditional and social media, targeting communities seeking to address climate-driven destabilisation, policy-makers and NGOs.
This project is made possible with the generous support of the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation.
Project partners and contributors
Sydney Environment Institute: Professor Danielle Celermajer, Professor David Schlosberg, Genevieve Wright, Maria Paula Cardoso Nunez, Sacha Shaw, Josh Gowers, Amelie Vanderstock, Lottie Boardman
Social Entrepreneurship Association Auroville: Gijs Spoor, Pragnya Khanna, Deepthi Indukuri, Rohit Nair, Joel Shelton, Janet Orlene.
India and Bharat Together Foundation: Aadya Singh, Mayank Shah, VPJ Sambhavi, Ambika Kaushik, Dawa Dolma, Stanzin Dorijai, Anjali Devi, Arun Prasad, Vijay Singh Jethi, Babloo Farswan.
Project partners: Vikalp Sangam, Sustainable Agriculture Gardening Australia (SAGE), Blue Mountains Planetary Health Initiative, Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC), Keystone Foundation, Maati Sangathan, Navikarana Trust, Uttaranchal Youth and Research Development Centre (UYRDC).
Featured research outputs
Magazine: Grounded Imaginaries: Storytelling and research in the times of the climate crisis
By Gijs Spoor, Pragnya Khanna, Pakhi Sen and Darren Dsouza. The magazine is a playful and visionary glimpse into our collective Grounded Imaginaries journey – shaped as a diary of the project recounted through the lens of Tamil Nadu’s project managers. It combines intellectual inquiry, process documentation and graphic illustration of some of the key concepts that we explored in the duration of the project. It also includes learning resources for sense-making and response-shaping through the climate crisis, and “portals” to the multimedia outputs created as part of the project.
Video: The Stuff of Imaginaries
By Rohit Nair. This video essay introduces the concept of imaginaries and explores how the “failure of imagination” brought about by the climate crisis can be countered by creating new and grounded imaginaries. It explores the power of stories and what they can offer us in these unpredictable times.
Street Art: Mountain Murals: Narratives from the Nilgiris
By Janet Orlene. This collaborative street art project is a graphic exploration of the beauty and complexity of the Nilgiris through the creation of public-friendly artworks. What role can street art play in storytelling and the climate crisis? Can we design inclusive community lead processes? Where can we use the power of imagination that art brings to reimagine how communities construct their social narratives? Read and watch about the process here.
Video: ‘Chu Med’ – No Water
Directed by Dawa Dolma, Mayank Shah, Stanzin Dorijay. Hear from a community in Ladakh’s remote Zanskar region who is trying to survive a devastating water scarcity crisis despite institutional apathy and worsening climate change impacts that could alter their lives forever.
Video: Grounded Imaginaries
This short film, directed by Sacha Shaw, interrogates imaginaries of climate changed futures; the expectations about how the world works, how we work in the world, the force that renders some objects and actions important and valuable, and others, unimportant, uninteresting and even, dangerous.
Using the concept of social imaginaries, this short film will demonstrate how our ‘personal’ imaginaries are interpolated within broader and collective future imaginaries.
Finalist at the Blue Mountain Short Film Festival, and selected for the Roma Short Film Festival.
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