Shaping Climate Narratives Impact Outcomes

Shaping Climate Narratives students had an incredible opportunity to join faculty from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and School of Music, Dance and Theater in creating a theater performance piece as a key component to their Lab’s climate exploration. The foundation for the piece originated from Voices from the Future, a collection of more than 30 stories and interviews of survivors of extreme weather events including floods, fire and more spanning five separate continents.

Students from the Lab partnered with ASU Library’s Director of Data Science and Analytics as well as Director of their Map and Geospatial Hub as part of their research into the Lab’s climate-based inquiries and in preparation for developing, writing and staging their performance. Lab impact outcomes included:

– Opening texts for the performance piece that were honed to audiences such as academics, students and community organizations. A handful of targeted variations included a song and spoken intros catering to political conferences, high school students, sporting event audiences and environmental youth scout groups.

– Various media pieces created with data visualization and cartography. For example, one student team created a digital layer map with a program called ArcGIS StoryMaps that delineates areas of the world where weather events have historically occurred and enables users to interact with the map to learn about overlapping events in particular regions.