Co-Creating Climate Narratives using Art, Literature, and Public Engagement

This project emerged from Daniela Dora’s involvement in the University of Cambridge Festival, where collaboration with local artists and community participants helped her to explore how literary scholarship can engage the wider public in environmental questions. Building on this context, the research investigates how participatory, art-based practices foster embodied ecological awareness.

At its core is an interdisciplinary workshop combining plaster casting, botanical materials, and climate fiction to create “botanical biographies”, which are artefacts where natural imprints and literary language intersect. Using a citizen-science approach, participants act as co-researchers. The study draws on surveys, reflections, interviews, and observation to examine how material engagement with text and nature reshapes environmental perception.

This research contributes to ongoing discussions about the social impact of the humanities by showing how creative, community-based methodologies – developed through partnerships between scholars and local artists – can deepen environmental engagement. Early findings suggest that such embodied practices foster forms of ecological awareness that extend beyond conventional reading experiences, offering new ways of connecting literary studies with lived environmental concerns.