Event partner
Event_
Climate change and the quest for transformative fictions
Cli Fi aspires to envision a climate change culture for readers who are in some caseslosing their sense of what it means to be human, to strive for a common good, and tolove.
Since climate change began to show itself in the late twentieth century, varied literary genres orforms have come into being to speak of human extinction and the profound loss of animal habitatsthat climate change entails. Climate fiction, or Cli Fi, is the most well-known. Fictions called Cli Fi areremarkably diverse, ranging from psychological Realism to science fiction to newer genresattempting to stand apart from Cli Fi, such as Solarpunk. Cli Fi ranges across media, from digitalto television, film, short fiction, novels, and memoir. Professor Stephanie LeMenager’s discussionof climate change culture begins in the struggle to create transformative fictions, by whichshe means the struggle to find new stories and states of feeling, new patterns of expectation andmeans of living with an unprecedented set of limiting conditions. More broadly, this talk addressesthe ways in which Cli Fi aspires to envision a climate change culture for readers who are in somecases losing their sense of what it means to be human, to strive for a common good, and to love.
This event was presented at the University of Sydney on Tuesday 30 May 2017 in partnership with the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies.
Speakers
Stephanie LeMenager is the Moore Endowed Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Over the years, her career developed toward the environmental humanities through programming and outreach work at my former university, UC-Santa Barbara, and through my finding roles in diverse green public humanities ventures, including the environmental humanities journal Resilience, co-founded with Professor Stephanie Foote of the University of Illinois. Other collaborations include the “i (heart) h2o” campus lab project for raising student awareness aboutwater systems with artists Sara Daleiden and Therese Kelly and professor JanetWalker, international relationships with Stockholm University, where she has taught, and Mid-Sweden University, which will partner with University of Oregon faculty and graduate students to address environmental crises such as climate change through culture and media. She has been aninvited steering committee member in the Mellon-sponsored “Humanities for the Environment”(HfE) Observatory administered at Arizona State University, a curatorial consultant at the BlafferMuseum in Houston, Texas, for an installation by Zina Saro Wiwa which addresses the legacies of oil and art in the Niger Delta, and has been a member of the “After Oil” research and public outreach collective, based in Canada. These projects, in addition to her recent book Living Oil: PetroleumCulture in the American Century (Oxford U Press, 2014), represent her commitment to building out the strengths of her training in literary and cultural studies toward interdisciplinary teaching and abroad discussion of what it means to be human in the era of climate change.
Christopher Wright is Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School where he teaches and researches organisational change, sustainability and critical understandings of capitalism and political economy. He has published extensively on the history of management, management consultancy, the changing nature of the labour process. His current research explores organizational and societal responses to climate change, with a particular focus on how managers and business organizations interpret and respond to the climate crisis. He has published on this topic in relation to issues of corporate environmentalism, corporate citizenship, organizational justification and compromise, risk, identity and future imaginings. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently: Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-destruction (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Jennifer Mae Hamilton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney funded by The Seed Box: A MISTRA-FORMASEnvironmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linköping University, Sweden. She is also an adjunct lecturer in Ecocriticism at New York University (Sydney) and an Associate Investigator with the ARCCentre of Excellence in the History of Emotions. Jennifer completed a PhD in English at the University of NSW (UNSW). During her candidature she tutored in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNSW and English at the Western Sydney University. Her dissertation has been adapted into the book ‘This Contentious Storm’: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. After her PhD she took an adjunct position in Environmental Humanities at UNSW (2013-2015), teaching and guest lecturing into their interdisciplinary programs. She co-convenes the reading group Composting: Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities here at the University of Sydney.