In the documentary This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein describes the limits of depicting climate change as the inevitable result of human nature driven by greed and competition. As Klein argues, this story of climate change diminishes social agency, promotes powerlessness, and displaces solutions beyond the repetition of the status quo. Several years later, capitalist realism and apocalypse remain primary modes through which climate futures are envisioned in news media, film, television, and literature. How do the dominant stories of human relationships to earth and understandings of futurity affect how the causes and solutions of climate change are imagined? Cultural texts remain creative forms through which to critique existing responses to climate change, imagine alternatives, expand collective understandings of what is possible. This panel welcomes papers which explore such questions as: - How does climate media facilitate or foreclose responses to climate change? - How do the genre conventions of climate change discourses expand or constrain forms of action and political horizons? - What is the role of fiction and nonfiction forms in mediating both the experience of climate change and the political solutions we envision? - How can cultural texts addressing climate change avoid fostering powerlessness? How might cultural texts activate audiences? Ultimately, this panel considers the role of cultural texts (news media, film, television, and literature) and genre assumptions in mediating responses to climate change and the possibilities of resilience these texts entail.  

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 Submit an abstract here by September 30: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19935 Membership is not required to submit abstracts. Feel free to email mollyhenderson @ gwmail.gwu.edu with questions!   Conference Information: 54th NeMLA Annual ConventionMarch 23-26, 2023Niagara Falls, NY Conference Theme: "The 2023 NeMLA conference theme is RESILIENCE, an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma, counter ableism, redress social and racial marginalization, environmental destruction, and how we celebrate bodily, cognitive, and neurological difference, access silenced voices, recover from the pandemic, and struggle to save the humanities, and humanity itself from the maw of neoliberalism." For more information, https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers.html.