Workshop "Applied Empirical Ecocriticism and Narrative’s Role in Environmental Advocacy”
This workshop introduces empirical ecocriticism, a dynamic field that investigates the social impact of environmental narratives using empirical methods (Malecki, 2023; Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020). The session consists of two parts: theoretical and practical. In the theoretical part, I will discuss the rising claims by scholars, activists, critics, and content creators that environmental narratives hold significant potential to shape public attitudes—a crucial consideration for addressing today’s environmental crises (Armitstead, 2021; Holmes, 2014; Malpas, 2021; Pak, 2021; Ullrich, 2015). I will then explore how empirical ecocriticism combines social scientific and humanistic methodologies to empirically test these claims (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2021, 2023). A key example will be a study examining the impact of climate fiction on emotions and intentions toward activism, covering its hypotheses, design, participant sample, stimuli, and instruments (Malecki et al., 2025; Schneider-Mayerson, 2018). In the practical part, participants will be invited to contribute to designing a new study on the effects of environmental narratives. Building on their interests and backgrounds, this collaborative project will offer an opportunity to conduct research individually or in partnership with other attendees.
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Prof. Wojciech Małecki is a university professor in the Department of Literary Theory at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His research focuses on the effects of narratives on attitudes, perception, and behavior, particularly in relation to the environment. His work has been published in journals such as Poetics, ISLE, PLOS One, and Science Education, featured in media outlets including The New York Times, Newsweek and Psychology Today, and translated into Chinese, Swedish, and other languages. His books include Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species (Routledge 2019), What Can We Hope For? (Princeton UP 2022), and Empirical Ecocriticism (U of Minnesota P, 2023). He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, The Free University of Berlin as well as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, and other institutions. He is currently leading a National Science Center-funded project on the social influence of climate fiction. |