Topic: Breaking Paradigms: Storying Climate Change

While developing a transdisciplinary, justice-centred pedagogy of climate change, Vandana Singh discovered the power of stories – from real-life to fictional, from social to scientific – to convey key teachings of the climate problem.  In this talk that reaches across and beyond disciplines, she describes how the narrative power of carefully curated stories can free us from paradigm blindness: the problem of applying the wrong framework to the complex of existential crises that includes climate change. 

About the speaker: 

A theoretical physicist by training, Vandana Singh is a transdisciplinary scholar of climate change and a speculative fiction writer.  She is a professor of Physics and Environment in the Department of Environment, Society and Sustainability at Framingham State University near Boston. For more than a decade she has been working on a transdisciplinary, justice-centered pedagogy of the climate crisis, at the intersection of science, economics, sociology, philosophy, history, and futures studies. She has developed an interdisciplinary case study on Arctic Climate change and its impacts on Native Alaskan communities, and co-led a workshop for high school teachers on teaching climate change. She is a member of the Delhi-based Teachers Against the Climate Crisis and a 2021 Climate Imagination Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.