Climate Witnessing
Special issue of Memory Studies Review 2.2 (2025)
Guest-editors: Stef Craps, Rick Crownshaw, and Rebecca Dolgoy

This new special issue brings together scholars and artists working at the intersection of memory studies, the environmental humanities, and museum and media studies to rethink witnessing in the age of climate breakdown.

Building on and extending trauma and testimony theory, the contributions explore how environmental loss is registered, mediated, and remembered across human and more-than-human scales – from slow violence and deep time to ecological grief, material and aesthetic witnessing, and questions of responsibility and justice.

This special issue grew out of conversations within the Slow Memory COST Action. Almost half of the articles, including the introduction, are Open Access.

Explore the full issue here.

Table of Contents

Introduction—Climate Witnessing: Memory, Mediation and the More-than-Human
Stef Craps, Rick Crownshaw and Rebecca Dolgoy

The Black Gold Tapestry
Sandra Sawatzky

More-than-Human Witnesses and Deep Time

Cast in Stone: Non-human Witnesses for a More-than-Human Age
Clara de Massol de Rebetz

Geologic Testimony: The Fossil as Climate Witness
Mara van Herpen        

Ice Witnesses: Exploring the Natural-Cultural Memory of Climate Change in Susan Schuppli’s Learning from Ice
Simon Probst and Gabriele Dürbeck

The Temporality of Climate Witnessing: Ice, Simulation, Image
Piotr M. Szpunar

Affective Archives and Situated Perspectives

Witnessing Otherwise: Storied Matter, Affect and Climate Change
Katarzyna Więckowska

“Vanishing Points”: Climate Witnessing at the End of the Earth
Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson

Museums and the Politics of Climate Memory

Museums and the Implicit Anthropocene: Witnessing in the Science Museum’s Energy Hall
Rick Crownshaw

Museum Visitors as Witnesses of Climate Change: Experiencing the Past, Present and Future of the Environmental Crisis in Exhibitions
Sophie Decroupet

Climate Witnessing in Canada’s National Science and Technology Collection
Casey Gray, Rebecca Dolgoy, Peter Hodgins and Barbara Leckie

The Seedling: Transforming Climate through Art and Awi’nakola
Andrew Ambers, Carey Newman and Jeremy Mendes