Global Climate Education and Its Discontent: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is a collection of essays that reflect on a variety of experiences around the world engaged in drama as a pedagogical tool to connect with the climate crisis and its emotional effects. The book showcases the contributions of participants in a six-year project that asked, ‘Can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice?’ The research and the book’s shared intention is to ‘bring hope and concerted action to the dire challenge of climate change and species survival’ (p. 1). The research project, Global (Digital) Citizen–Artists and Their Publics: Performing for Socio-ecological Justice, or Audacious Citizenship for short, understands that engagement through art – and in this case drama – is a powerful mode of caring about the world around us, and bringing a sense of care to the surface, beyond scientific knowledge and understanding.
The discontent with climate education highlighted in the title is understood as the acknowledgement that the ‘“transferal” of science knowledge in climate education’ (p. 8) basically fostered emotional paralysis; along these lines, in the Introduction, Gallager and Balt quote Arturo Escobar: ‘we have become rational, dreamless people’ (p. 11). Some key concepts in the book aimed at tackling this inability to dream, or even dare to imagine, a future are ‘hope’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘togetherness’.
The book is divided into two parts, ‘Local Engagements and Encounters’ and ‘Pedagogical and Artistic Innovations’, including seven chapters each. The editors’ Introduction offers a clear navigational map of the book and the ethics that nurture the research project. The project’s position was not aimed at achieving an aesthetical outcome, but to ‘respect the multiple modes of thinking, expression, and communication that artful engagement’ elicits (p. 3), relying particularly on devising theatre methodologies. Through the chapters, the stated collaborative and horizontal way of working within the leading team is crystallized in the variety of practices showcased involving different communities around the globe.
It is noteworthy that the project was challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, yet the team worked with this disruptive element and not against it. The lockdowns brought to the surface the disparities between the diverse communities and practitioners involved in the project, rendering these more palpable than the researchers had envisioned prior to the project.
A thread that intertwines throughout the chapters is the notion that the opportunity to perform as a living being – human and more-than-human – in an imagined future renders an opening to appreciate that other futures are possible. Likewise, preparation to embody the lived experience of an individual in a different community or time requires close observation, attuning with all senses and collectively finding a way to express such diversity. On a deeper level of understanding, this requires selflessness from the performer. ‘The kindness of theatre – and perhaps part of its appeal – is that it never requires us to reconfigure or relocate permanently’ (p. 281), and in this exercise, something comes forward with its generative potential. Therein lies the seed of active hope or environmental hope that the project pursues.
