Nuclear Fictional Narratives in Envisioning Future Scenarios: Imaginaries for Energy Literacy
摘要
Being a tool for developing “future literacy” in order to express and absorb meaning through the various forms of communication, narratives contribute crucially to framing, exploring, and imagining possible future scenarios. The amalgamation of creativity, scientific data, and societal agenda, together with research-led theoretical inquiry, enhances future universities to study narratives not only as a tool of transmitting scientific knowledge to the public (via appealing to myths, archetypes, and storytelling), but also, by regarding narratives as a world-building technique, future universities allow going beyond limits of human imagination (bias, subjectivity, interpretation challenges) through cultural and ontological envisions of the imagined futures, which can set the intersectional milestones of shaping future scenarios. The intersection of nuclear narratives involves the use of systems thinking, scenario development, and narrative construction to understand the potential futures related to nuclear technology, nuclear energy, nuclear policy, defining nuclear literacy as a tool of understanding possible futures. In understanding the role of narratives in framing nuclear literacy for envisioning possible futures, the chapter appeals to applying a narrative approach to study the imagination of personal futures, which allows storytelling possible futures via personal life-writing, where the spatiotemporal parameters of the events define historical, cultural, and social circumstances of conceptualizing “nuclear literacy” as societal value. The chapter intends to show the valorization of imaginaries for envisioning futures in fictional narratives, regarded not only a tool of transmitting nuclear knowledge to public (nuclear literacy) as well as envisioning futures (futures literacy) via the imaginaries of futures on the example of Rachel Barenbaum’s Atomic Anna (2022). The chapter appeals to the motif of ‘future’ in nuclear fictional writing to demonstrate how the knowledge transition contributes to framing a social imagination of possible futures.