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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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.

Perspectives

This shift to a distributed, co-produced process puts pressure on researchers to recognize the incompleteness of our approaches, the blind spots that can limit the questions we ask, and thus the biases that can affect what we get from climate simulations. However, what we as researchers lose in control, we gain in the partnerships for action needed to respond to the urgency of our changing climate

Professor William J. Gutowski
Iowa State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Mind the gaps! Climate scientists should heed lessons in collaborative storytelling from William Shakespeare, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change, May 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/wcc.783.
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