This piece reflects on the potential role of poetic inquiry methods in creating the basis for multivocal climate and environmental analysis. These approaches create spaces of possibility beyond dominant technoscientific and Eurocentric climate discourses. We offer two examples of poetic inquiry that help us to collaboratively explore and connect collective action and environmental injustice across the regions we call home: the Middle East & North Africa and the United States South. We write from our positionalities as scholar-activist-artists and bring our contexts into conversation as an effort toward building transcontinental solidarities. Drawing on recent scholarship engaging with geopoetics, storytelling, and poetic inquiry, we illustrate how poetic methods hold potential for powerful practices of (re)composition, can be generative of relational and place-based understandings of climate and environmental justice, and inclusive of multiple voices and diverse relationships to space and time. Our poems are grounded in the present, evoke the hauntings and residues of the past, and foretell of futures otherwise. By deploying poetic inquiry, we attempt to draw seemingly disparate times, places, words, and voices into conversation to produce expansive multivocal compositions that encourage us to attend to underexamined aspects of climate and environmental justice.
Ortiz et al. (Wed,) studied this question.