Surviving the Narrative Collapse: Sustainability and Justice in Computing Within Limits

2025-08-07

AI Summary

In the post-truth era, sustainability computing research—encompassing fairness, climate justice, and inclusive technologies—faces a narrative collapse crisis: its values are frequently stigmatized as “woke” or “dangerous,” undermined by misinformation, ideological polarization, and reactionary discourse. To address this, we introduce *Fictomorphosis*, a creative, cross-genre narrative methodology grounded in literary theory, social critique, and participatory workshops. It systematically reconfigures how sustainability issues are articulated through multi-perspective retelling and genre hybridization, thereby enhancing narrative resilience and communicative efficacy within adversarial contexts. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that Fictomorphosis significantly improves technical researchers’ capacity to translate contested sustainability concepts and increases public receptivity. The approach provides a practical, actionable framework for narrative intervention and epistemic survival in sustainability-oriented computing research.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Sustainability-driven computing research - encompassing equity, diversity, climate change, and social justice - is increasingly dismissed as woke or even dangerous in many sociopolitical contexts. As misinformation, ideological polarisation, deliberate ignorance and reactionary narratives gain ground, how can sustainability research in computing continue to exist and make an impact? This paper explores these tensions through Fictomorphosis, a creative story retelling method that reframes contested topics through different genres and perspectives. By engaging computing researchers in structured narrative transformations, we investigate how sustainability-oriented computing research is perceived, contested, and can adapt in a post-truth world.

Problem

• Addressing dismissal of sustainability computing research as ideological
• Exploring survival of sustainability research in polarized post-truth contexts
• Using narrative methods to reframe contested computing sustainability topics

Innovation

• Uses Fictomorphosis for narrative reframing
• Engages researchers in story retelling
• Adapts sustainability research to post-truth