Project description
Words of ecological transformation in climate fiction
The words we use and the stories we tell can shape public imagination, emotional engagement and responses to climate change. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ECOTRANS project aims to explore how languages from different cultures re-imagine future environmental scenarios and shape the public’s attitudes towards climate change issues. The project will specifically examine the use of ecological speculative fictions in Japan, Finland and Anglo-America to help people imagine and emotionally engage with the process of environmental transformation. Through the use of corpus linguistic analysis, the project aims to establish the linguistic patterns that have a bearing on how ecological crises are portrayed.
Objective
In the face of accelerating climate change, it is realistic to consider ways in which individuals and society could adapt to living in transformed environments. Ostensibly about the future, 21st century speculative fiction actually contemplates what could be done right now in response to such environmental crises. The potential of ecological speculative fiction to cause readers to imaginatively grapple with environmental crises, and thus potentially to influence their emotions, dispositions, and behaviors regarding them, has been established; however, such effects and the precise textual features that kindle them have been under-researched. ECOTRANS investigates how ecological speculative fiction from Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo-American cultural contexts enables readers to re-imagine and re-engage with climate change by uncovering distinct vocabularies of ecological transformation in a multi-lingual corpus. In doing so, this project connects culturally specific thematizations of environmental crisis to readers’ imaginative and agential possibilities. This project applies an interdisciplinary, corpus-driven methodology that integrates ecolinguistics, which offers a framework for understanding the activist potential of language; corpus stylistics, which enables scalable, retrievable, and replicable analysis; and science fiction studies, which brings insight into how speculative language shapes reader imaginaries. At the heart of the approach is the concept of vocabularies of ecological transformation – lexical and grammatical patterns that express culturally specific ways of imagining and responding to environmental change. This comparative and corpus-stylistic study will produce new insight into the role of language in shaping ecological imagination and adaptation by illuminating culturally and linguistically specific lexical strategies for speculative engagement with ecological crises and transformations.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
10120 Tallinn
Estonia
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