About this series
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The 2024 Climate Disaster team (from left) Sarah Drysdale, Prof. Sean Holman, Lisa Taylor K.C. Jordan, Kayleigh Stevens, Ben Harris, Amy Fiske and Charlotte McConkey. Not pictured Eunice Abaga, Nour Hafid and Chloe Hannan.
In the winter of 2024, nine senior journalism students experimented with an innovative approach to journalistic coverage of climate change. The Climate Disaster Project, a global student newsroom project coordinated by Prof. Sean Holman at the University of Victoria, leverages an approach to journalistic storytelling that is trauma-informed and collaborative.
The course, led at King’s by Prof. Lisa Taylor, aims to change the extractive nature of journalism. “We like to think of journalists as storytellers but, in reality, we’re often story takers,” says Taylor. “However, the Climate Disaster Project curriculum gives control to interview subjects, so people who are interviewed about these experiences have a say in what questions they’re asked, and they get to review the work before it’s published, which is rare in journalism.”
That control is important for people who have lost their sense of control during a disaster. And that’s also why most of the news stories produced for the Climate Disaster Project are presented as first-person stories, so climate disaster survivors tell their own stories in their own words.
Some of those stories are here on The Signal, while others are on the Climate Disaster Project website; other stories from the project will be published in an anthology slated for publication by Purich Books, an imprint of UBC Press; it will be released in fall 2025.
