Creative writing workshops to collectively imagine a desirable future based on scientific foresight studies
Résumé
The Breton interdisciplinary political ecology group (ÉPolAr) provides a space for researchers to share and develop knowledge related to ecological issues. ÉPolAr has organised a series of public conferences and runs a monthly Stories We Live By (Stibbe, 2021) seminar. As a result of our activities, and in line with our initial objective to invent new inspiring forms of action, we are developing a methodology for creative writing workshops based on scenarios proposed in the Agrimonde-Terra scientific foresight studies for food security (Le Mouël et al., 2018) and the ADEME (2022) energy transition studies. Language is "das Haus des Seins", or home to the world (Lacroix, 2010: 75), so critical language awareness is crucial for conveying positive stories which can create our current and future ways of living in the world. The aim is to hold workshops for a wide variety of different participants within and beyond academia and thereby to make scientific projection research more widely accessible, including for the general public. We hope this methodology will empower people to invent their own evidence-based stories to live by, situated in many possible, desirable, visions of the future, and that they will then feel enabled to work towards
putting in place concrete and realistic action to create such a future. This paper will present the workshop methodology and recent experiences of its application.