How Can Making Art Together Spark Dialogue About Climate Change?

Wish You Were Here: Climate Postcards is an arts-informed research project exploring perspectives and emotions around human-induced climate change.  

This project invites individuals to reflect on what climate change means to them through creative self-expression while generating dialogue about climate effects with others. Through this project we are investigating how biophysical, geographic, cultural, and social elements of place inform understandings of climate impacts and the role that emotions play in our sense of agency to take action. We are interested in how making and sharing art can generate more nuanced, holistic, and diverse perspectives of climate issues.

Understanding more about how we feel about our changing planet can help make the complex topic of climate change more accessible and emotionally resonant. Connecting our emotions to places, real or imagined, grounds our feelings and enables us to engage in a dialogue about fear, grief, anxiety, anger, frustration, curiosity, and hope. Reflecting on the complex array of emotions we feel through creative self-expression may help us better understand and address the crisis we all face. 

Wish You Were Here: Climate Postcards is led by researchers Gigi Owen and Rachel Zollinger and assisted by Elena Greenberg, Ursula Basinger, and Olivia Miltner.