Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

This seminar approaches climate change not as an isolated crisis but as one manifestation of a deeper planetary condition: the absence of space—both material and imaginative. In earlier human histories, architecture and literature evolved in reciprocal relation to natural environments: dwellings accommodated multiple species, and oral traditions carried ecological knowledge across generations. Over time, these practices became cultural systems that appropriated rather than coexisted with their surroundings. Architecture reorganised land within human-defined boundaries; literature, increasingly formalised through canonical frameworks, filled mental landscapes with conceptual enclosures, erasing the “blank spaces” where alternative epistemologies might have taken root. The result has been the constriction of both ecological vitality and imaginative capacity.

Framed through Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope and Gayatri Spivak’s concept of planetarity, this seminar examines how Generations Z and Alpha—shaped by digital networks, global mobility, immersive virtual worlds, and artificial intelligence—are unsettling inherited epistemologies and spatial imaginaries. For these cohorts, climate change is less a root cause than a symptom of deeper spatial and epistemic closures. Their creative practices—ranging from speculative fiction to digital activism—often bypass rather than contest earlier binaries: real/virtual, human/nonhuman, analogue/AI, nature/culture, citizen/refugee.

Works such as Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb, and collaborative platforms like the Young Writers Project model inclusive narrative architectures that dissolve fixed spatial imaginaries. Precedents include N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which stage space as relational and contested. In architecture, Yasmeen Lari’s humanitarian designs and MASS Design Group’s socially engaged projects embody a spatial ethics of repair, justice, and ecological responsiveness over monumental assertion.

We invite contributions that reconceptualise literature and architecture as practices of opening rather than enclosure, exploring how reimagined forms of narrative and design might restore the physical and imaginative conditions for a planetary future beyond the crisis of absence.

Possible areas of engagement include, but are not limited to:

• Literary and architectural mediations of planetary belonging
• Generational perspectives (Gen Z and Alpha) on space, climate, and imagination
• Speculative fiction, narrative architectures, and ecological imaginaries
• Intersections of digital networks, artificial intelligence, and spatial design
• Narrative and design practices of repair, justice, and ecological responsiveness
• Comparative literature approaches to planetary narratives and spatial imaginaries
• Diasporic, refugee, and stateless imaginaries of home, movement, and belonging
• Postcolonial and decolonial engagements with literature, space, and climate
• Memory, ruins, and archives as narrative architectures of history and ecology
• Cross-media storytelling (oral, visual, digital, performative) as planetary practice

Submission Instructions:

The deadline for paper proposals is Thursday, October 2, 2025 (EST). Please submit your proposal (approximately 300 words / 1,500 characters) accompanied by a brief bio through the ACLA portal at the following link: ACLA Submission Portal.

 Note: Proposals sent via email will not be considered.

 For any questions or further information, please contact Sohan Sharif at sharif.stu2017@juniv or Prof. Dr. Md. Rezaul Islam Shamim at shamimreza@Juniv.edu

Organizer 

Sohan Sharif, Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Jahangirnagar University.

Professor Dr. Shamim Reza (Md. Rezaul Islam), Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.