Using Climate Fiction for Community Engagement: The Role of Narratives and Storytelling

Reflections on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island by Julia Ludewig.

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Ludewig, Julia

Allegheny College, US

Julia Ludewig is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar who is fascinated by stories and how they shape societies. Her background is in cultural and literary studies, with a BA from the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and a PhD from Binghamton University, US, as well as in linguistics, where she obtained an MA at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany. Inspired by these academic fields, she looks at language, values, and culturally informed behavior in an endeavor to understand our wicked social and environmental problems. Her primary analytical texts are comics and graphic novels, but she is branching out to include the cultural production in various media.

Browse the exhibition

From Opposition to Understanding: An Overview of Ahousaht’s Relationship with Fish Farms in Their Ha’houlthee (Traditional Territories)

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Perspectives Issue 2012/4

David Frank, Paul Robinson, and Wally Samuel highlight how the Ahousaht Nation navigates fish farming by balancing economic benefits, environmental stewardship, and cultural values through local governance and negotiated agreements.

Summary and Concluding Remarks

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Perspectives Issue 2012/4

Camilla Brattland and Dorothee Schreiber emphasize that, despite varying stances on salmon farming, Indigenous communities share a commitment to protecting wild salmon, asserting their rights and perspectives, and promoting collaborative decision-making locally and globally.

A Place Called Tana

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Perspectives Issue 2012/4

Bjarne Johansen advocates for the restoration of coastal Sami fishing rights and stricter limits on river and salmon farming practices to protect wild salmon, cultural traditions, and fjord communities from environmental and regulatory harm.

“(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini”

(Dis)Empowered Communities promises to challenge consolidated, and often misleading, ideas about the fate of obsolete nuclear facilities, as Davide Orsini explains in an interview with historian Uwe Lübken.

Read more about “(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini”

“Puppets at the Hands of Water: Sex Workers in Mongla, Bangladesh”

Amrita Dasgupta shows how the littoral sex workers of the Mongla brothel struggle to make a livelihood in the face of climate change.

Read more about “Puppets at the Hands of Water: Sex Workers in Mongla, Bangladesh”

Structures

The third chapter of “Wetland Times,” “Structures.”

Wetland Times

Wetlands are ecologically dynamic and vulnerable landscapes where multiple temporalities, human and nonhuman, intersect and challenge one another. This virtual exhibition explores the dynamic temporalities of wetlands and their complex relationships—the temporal imaginaries, narratives, structures, flows, (a)synchronicities, and ruptures they contain—framed by a conceptual vocabulary that reveals the role of language in understanding wetland times and temporalities. Our examples draw on case studies from three wetlands: the Wadden Sea in Northern Europe; Morecambe Bay, in the northwest of the United Kingdom; and the Dja-et-Lobo region in southern Cameroon, focusing specifically on wetland areas near settlements of the Baka People.

About the Exhibition

About the author

Azambuja, Enaiê Mairê

Lancaster University, UK

Dr. Enaiê Mairê Azambuja is a fellow in environmental humanities in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. Her work primarily focuses on literature and poetry, and she is interested in the intersections between ecological thought, cultural narratives, and the environmental imagination.

Ewing, Blake

University of Nottingham, UK

Dr. Blake Ewing is an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham. His core interest is in the politics of time, with a focus on this project on the temporalities of conservation practices.

Thomas, Nicola

Lancaster University, UK

Dr. Nicola Thomas is a lecturer in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. She is interested in cultural ways of understanding space, time, and the environment, across languages.