Telling climate stories with communities not to them: Lessons from Shakespeare

What is it about?

Scientists are increasingly using storytelling to connect with the broader public. Data shaped through stories captures the imagination, sparks emotion, and resonates with personal experience. Through these connections, researchers hope to build relationships that lead to action. But these detailed narratives often yield skepticism and indecision rather than fostering collaboration that engages both researchers’ and communities’ expertise, concerns, and values—the very elements storytelling is designed to bridge.

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Photo by Deniz Demirci on Unsplash

Photo by Deniz Demirci on Unsplash

Why is it important?

So what might William Shakespeare, one of the most famous and continuously relevant Western storytellers, have to teach us about collaborative storytelling that could be useful for such pressing matters as climate change? Something quite powerful, it turns out. Shakespeare knew that narratives that capture the imagination and create connection often have something rather counter-intuitive: they have gaps; they leave some details unspecified. Scholars who study cognition and narratives note that it is into these spaces that readers connect the story with their own experiences. These gaps are the reason his work has spurred so many individualized interpretations.

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