I’ve been publishing fiction professionally (that means getting paid for it) since 1997. But one of the informal goals I’ve set myself as an author is to try to publish texts in as wide a variety of media as possible. For example, I’ve published a role-playing scenario and two articles in the now defunct magazine Casus Belli, written a children’s text for Bayard Presse… and co-signed a scientific article this January.
Like all self-respecting articles, it has a super duper long title:
The title of the journal is Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science and, unlike Casus Belli, I don’t regularly read it. But the other L. of L.L.Kloetzer, the one who does scientific research, knows it well.
In this paper, we describe research carried out over the last five years during the Environmental Psychology course taught by L.K. (the other one) at the University of Neuchâtel. In this course, the teacher uses protokools from Zanzibar [fr] to get students thinking about the future.

With the permission of the people involved, we studied the stories produced, which enabled us 1) to link the construction of the stories with the mechanisms of imagination described by Lev Vygotski, the coolest and most Marxist of psychology researchers.
The protokool used is a ‘classic’ that we have played on many occasions with our zanzi-friends.
In the first phase, people are asked to describe a familiar place in a future that they do not want to happen.

In the second phase, they were asked to describe the same place in a future they thought desirable.

We then asked ourselves what imaginary resources, whether personal, current affairs or fictional, were mobilised to construct these ‘snapshots of the future’ (I didn’t say it, but the students had 10 minutes each time to draw up their texts).
To focus on fictional resources, we asked ourselves whether the stories produced in 1.1 were more ‘Wall-E’ (dead world, piles of rubbish), more ‘Mad Max’ (looters and violence), more ‘The Road’ (nuclear or climatic apocalypse), more ‘Brave New World’, and so on.
Or if the stories produced in 1.2 (positive) were more like ‘Green World’ (that’s what I call the current minimalist ecological ideal: recycling, permaculture, short cycles, etc.), more like ‘Snow White’ (we live happily in the forest with the animals), more like ‘Nausicaa’ (hard-working, isolated country communities with a bit of tech), more like ‘Star Trek’ (super tech helps us overcome problems)…
It was I (LK) who named the fictional categories, throw me some stones if you find them silly 😅.
I’ll comment on the results of the study in a future post, but if you’re impatient, you can read the paper!
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