Fiona Cameron

The concern in this presentation is directed to reworking climate change narratives in museum exhibitions in light of the rethink of modernity’s relations with nature, which itself is due to the emergence of ecological forms of thinking and acting and the Critical Posthumanities. It will draw on the exhibition Atmosphere: Exploring Climate Science at the Science Museum, London, as a case study, in order to illustrate how we might compose climate change narratives and rearrange collections differently to invoke a more-than-human way of thinking and acting in the world.

This choice to focus on a climate change exhibition narrative is, firstly, due to the undeniable, persuasive power of museums as authoritative pedagogical apparatuses; and, secondly, it is an opportunity to explore the logic that underlies our interface with the non-human world. The Museum’s authoritative position as a trusted source of information on the science of climate change, second only to science research institutions, highlights the important role it and similar institutions can play in curating new narratives of climate change and environmental issues, more generally.

To do this work, the paper draws on a range of post-human and new materialisms proposals and explores the potential uses of these relational and processual approaches for collapsing culture/nature dualisms; for individuating big Nature; and for detailing ways we can be more attentive to the folded, material, entangled, and embedded relations between humans, non-humans, and earthly processes, as well as to how these might inform the development of new social collectives for a more-than-human world.