Genre in the Climate Debate

After a long wait, Genre in the Climate Debate, is out. It is a research anthology I have edited alongside a very old partner-in-crime, Christel Sunesen of the micro-publishing house Ekbátana (named, I believe, after a poem by Danish master poet Sophus Claussen—no, the Wikipedia-article doesn't even begin to do him justice) with whom I have also published this book on Grundtvig and genre (in Danish). It's been a long wait and as you can see from the volume the afterword was written in August 2019.  But fortunately most of its value hasn't suffered from the protracted publication process. And anyway, protracted publication is another name for "academic publication". Good friends helped me formulate some of the presentation for the Det Gruyter homepage, and it ended up looking like this: 

The presentation of the book on the De Gruyter homepage reads like this:

Benefits

• The volume establishes a dynamic interplay between two high-level research fields: humanistic climate studies and genre research
• The volume offer an understanding of the way the structural and ideological issues in the debate over anthropogenic climate change are determined by the genres in play in the debate.
• The volume continues key developments in contemporary genre research, in particular the use of genre in political campaigning and the uptake of genre information and action across genre systems.

The greatest conundrum concerning anthropogenic climate change may prove to be in the humanities and the social sciences. How is it even possible that highly exigent information for which overwhelming evidence exists does not make an immediate and strong impact on ideologies, policies, and life practices across the globe? This volume offers an intriguing and enlightening new approach to the the climate debate by taking it as a question of genre. Genres are the cultural categories that structure human understanding and communication, and genre research therefore offers a central key to unlocking the conundrum. From a genre perspective, if there is one thing the climate debate demonstrates, it is the inertia inherent in genre use. Patterns of understanding and interpretation once established seem to carry on even when they have long outlived their usefulness.

However, it is also evident that uses of genre can work to change this inertia. Genres play a vital role in human interaction, as we use them to learn, express ourselves, and to act. How individual actors utilize or manipulates genres determines to what extent knowledge of climate change spreads from the scientific community to the public, how it is debated, and to what extent it leads to positive action.

I am, obviously, very happy to see it published. The long wait involved in having edited volumes means that people will submit to you and then you'll keep them in a year-long standby while you wait for all the cogs, wheels and gears to work together. So the release when the book is finally there is palpable.

But there's also another sort of release in a book like this. For decades, literally, I have been scared to the point of paralysis about anthropogenic climate change, and I'm not alone in being paralyzed. In fact one of the most eye-opening studies I read in preparation for the volume deals with "The Dragons of Inaction"—understood as the psychological barriers that hold us back from taking intelligent action on anthropogenic climate change. However, on having finally actually engaged with the topic, I find it less scary, not because it turns out to be less real on closer inspection, or even less dangerous, but because I feel less powerless,  since now I experience that I am at least doing something. Moreover, I find that acting also breaks isolation, because it leads me to meet, discuss, and sometimes even work with engaged researcher from other fields equally engaged—sometimes even in a much more committed way—to making a difference. Shared worry is half worry, and shared strength is double strength. Happy to add mine.