science and culture

Graduate Center for Literary Research Annual Conference Call for Papers

Climate Fictions

April 18-19, 2020

McCune Conference Room, HSSB

As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.

Theorizing about the body has never been more urgent than in our current era of climate change. Stacy Alaimo has compellingly argued that “potent ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature.” In the decade or so since she first penned those words, these ethical and political possibilities have become even more urgent, and the borders of the contact zones themselves have become more blurred. Climate change has had increasingly intimate corporeal implications (especially in the Global South), and the widening gap between the rich and the poor has only exacerbated these matters, as has the global rise in right-wing extremism.

Disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, but it has also done so for women and [other] minority groups. That is, not only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them.

-          Douglas C. Baynton, Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History

Abstract:

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A Workshop on Synthetic Sound and Modular Thought

October 2-4, 2020

York University

Toronto, Canada

From Ragnarok to Revelation, from the utopian proposals of Plato’s Republic to the dystopian vision of Huxley’s Brave New World, a prominent concern of human language and literature has always been to describe possible futures. Some of these visions of the future are cataclysmic, looking forward to a time when Heaven—or Mother Earth—will wipe the slate clean; others propose a more optimistic vision of progress. Recent films such as Interstellar or Tomorrowland have taken a middle way, suggesting that although humanity has recently fallen short of its promise, there still remains hope that we will be able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.