Reorientations: Practicing Grief and Hope in Post-Carbon Futures

In response to a modernist optimistic path that has typically colonised narratives of addressing climate change, this paper explores and proposes a prototypical pedagogy that aims to unlearn privileges and restore a sense of commitment and involvement in the unfolding future among the public. In our articulations of this prototypical pedagogy, we trace and reappropriate pedagogies of collective learning within participatory design in combination with contemporary discourses around the affective dimensions of climate change. The prototypical pedagogy is explored through a designerly study circle in future orienteering that was designed to situate the transition to post-carbon futures within specific locations, environments, and lived experiences. To support reorientations and explorations of alternatives to the familiar modernist path, a guiding principle was to foreground objects, values, and imaginaries that are often overlooked in current accounts of climate change and to activate grief and hope as both practical and conceptual orienteering devices.