The art of uncomfortable engagement: towards a methodology for conflictual theatre dialogues about climate change controversies

Climate change is increasingly proving to be a deeply polarizing and conflict-ridden societal issue. As a response to complex or “wicked” societal issues such as climate change, science communication research has developed various approaches to meaningfully engage publics and stakeholders in processes of scientific and technological development. Building on Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic pluralism, we argue that while providing a great source of creativity, inspiration and impact, the “cocreative” focus of many of these approaches makes it difficult to keep conflict, tension, and controversy at the forefront of engagement practices. The concern is that these practices of cocreation leave the fundamentally conflictual nature of climate change unaddressed, and consequently provide little guidance for learning how to deal with conflict and prevent it from becoming antagonistic.

There is therefore a great need for exploring engagement approaches that make the conflictual nature of climate change salient and “productive”, and we believe theatre dialogues have great potential to contribute to this objective. In our contribution, we report on the outcomes of interviews held to map three climate change-related controversies and stakeholders’ experiences of conflict within them, and on how these key findings inform the development of an innovative form of theatre dialogues in which sticking with the tension is key.