Harriet Bulkeley is Professor at Durham University, UK and Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research is concerned with the politics and governance of environmental issues, with a particular interest in climate change, energy, nature and urban sustainability. She is currently working on how nature-based solutions are coming to occupy a place in the political landscape of environmental governance. 

Johannes Stripple is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. His research has traced the governance of climate change through a range of sites, from the UN to the everyday, from the economy, the urban, and the low carbon self. Currently Johannes' work focus on how we imagine and engage an increasingly carbon constrained and warming world.

Harriet and Johannes share a wide interest in the cultural politics of climate change. They have jointly edited Governing the Climate: New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Decarbonising Economies (Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Harriet and Johannes have in the last years worked on a set of initiatives that through experimentation, narratives and speculative design portray the possibilities of life in a fossil-free future. Examples of these are the low carbon mobile laboratory, a tourist guide to a fictional decarbonized European city, the Carbon Ruins exhibition, soundwalks in changed climate, and a climate fiction writing contest.

JOHANNES STRIPPLE

Our starting point was that a lot of the stories we tell about futures world are quite poor. It’s not stories that are meeting the world as it is now. It’s difficult for people to inhabit the kinds of worlds that we imagine through scenarios or modelling, so there is a kind of distance between where we are now and the life worlds of a decarbonized or a post-fossil world.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Samantha Wynn with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Camila Rodriguez. Digital Media Coordinator is Hannah Story Brown.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.