We seek original research articles from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the theme of climate narratives of the future for the online research resource Climate Adaptation, an Oxford Intersection. 

What is Climate Adaptation and the Oxford Intersections?

Climate Adaptation is one of several recently announced Oxford Intersections from Oxford University Press. Each Oxford Intersection is an edited resource that deals with an urgent, cross-disciplinary theme (others include AI in Society, Borders, and Gender Justice). Each Intersection contains several sections. 

This Oxford Intersection on Climate Adaptation comprises ten sections, including “Adaptation and Justice”, “Learning from the Past”, “Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches”, and “Narratives of the Future”. 

What is the “Narratives of the Future” section about?

For our section on “Narratives of the Future”, we are interested in narratives of climate adaptation in the broadest sense of the word. Narratives are: stories and chronicles; rationales and explanations; organising principles and logics; the arcs of thought, belief, and feeling through and within which individuals, communities, societies, and institutions explain themselves and the world. 

We are interested in explorations of how narratives are shaped across: art, film, and literature; news and social media (from organised print or digital reporting to online spaces in which communications shape-shift through sharing); traditional, even ancient, approaches to life that remain relevant in a technologically advanced world; frameworks of knowledge in codified domains and disciplines such as science, law, risk, and finance; and even our movements through built, designed, and curated environments. 

We invite articles from a variety of disciplines, including from cross-disciplinary intersections, whether single-authored or multi-authored. In keeping with the overall subject of climate adaptation, we seek articles that emphasise climate adaptation over mere mitigation, and that are concerned with strategies of resilience and new ways of living in a changing climate. 

Articles can take the following forms:

• Studies from a range of disciplines of narrative modes and media that offer, or have potential to offer, innovative and positive futures of climate adaptation 
• Explorations of various conceptual approaches to and philosophies of narrative from different cultural and scholarly traditions, old and new, ancient and emerging, that offer versions of the future 
• Analyses of new and changing paradigms of feeling and imagining the future in climate awareness and action, and the ways these are being framed in a diverse range of narrative forms
• Accounts, with case studies, of various initiatives, old and new, for analysing, creating and/or communicating positive and collaborative narratives of climate adaptation.

This section is guided by the over-arching question: 

• How can we envision and create positive narratives of alternate futures in an increasingly unstable climate? 

It asks these specific questions:

• Across media, scientific, communal, and creative imaginings, what stories are being told that spur hope for equitable and attainable climate adaptation? 
• Whose stories are these and how can we ensure they represent a diverse and broad range of voices and perspectives? 
• What methods do we have for not just creating these narratives but communicating them? 
• What methods exist for understanding these narratives and their potential to effect change?

How to propose an article:

If you are interested in proposing an article, please send a proposal of max. 300 words to us by 31 May 2026, with information on author name(s) and institution(s), and, for multi-authored articles, author order. If you have an idea or an initial enquiry, just get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you!

Articles should be 6,000-10,000 words in length and will undergo rigorous peer review overseen directly by the Intersections team at Oxford University Press. They will form citable, primary research outputs. 

Our deadline for agreed articles for “Narratives of the Future” is 31 March 2027. The Climate Adaptation Intersection will launch its first articles in the autumn of 2026 and will continue to publish articles through to 2028. 

Email us at adeline.johnsputra@queensu.ca and kiuwai.chu@ntu.edu.sg.

“Narratives of the Future” section editors

Kiu-wai Chu (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Adeline Johns-Putra (Queen’s University, Canada)