As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media. By analyzing diverse forms—ranging from contemporary climate fiction to environmental documentaries and speculative ecologies in digital media and video games—this panel ultimately seeks to understand how storytelling shapes ecological consciousness, catalyzing radical responses to environmental degradation that potentially foster new kinds of kinship structures.

The seminar invites papers that interrogate the aesthetics and politics of ecological representation in a time of global trauma. Building on last year’s seminar related to queer homecoming, this seminar explores shifting understandings of belonging when our planetary home has grown toxic. Theoretically, it is invested in considering how ecocriticism might be synthesized with queer studies, using the work of scholars like Eben Kirksey who frame the bacterial world as offering estranging models for a “queer endosymbiotic love,” for a flourishing of queer communities during ecological crisis. We take seriously Lee Edelman’s challenge to move beyond the “Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” in his influential explorations of the death drive, to ask: what new futures might be available? What imaginaries lie before us at the end of the world as we know it?

Other questions that we hope to explore: How do narrative strategies in literature and media engage with concepts such as the Anthropocene, environmental justice, extinction, and sustainability? How do marginalized voices—Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, and diasporic—offer alternative ecological epistemologies that push beyond definite endings toward rebirth, transformation, and solidarity? What role do affect, imagination, and genre play in confronting ecological grief and fostering a queer kind of planetary care?

We particularly welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that combine literary analysis, media studies, environmental humanities, and cultural theory. Papers may consider works from any time period or geography, with a focus on how ecocritical analysis can offer new insights into environmental discourse and strategies for activism and resistance. This seminar aims to foster dialogue across literary and media disciplines, highlighting the power of narrative to critique extractivist ideologies and envision more just ecological queer futures. 

Please note that we seek papers from across disciplines and genres as well as pieces of creative work and visual media.

Abstracts can be submitted until October 2. If you have any questions, please reach out to the seminar co-organizers: Dr. Rebecca Ehrenwirth (rebecca.ehrenwirth@gmail.com) and Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef (fbenyous@ttu.edu).

ACLA seminar page for submission:

View Seminar | American Comparative Literature Association