Environmental Humanities for the Future Lecture Series



Lecture 1: Salvage and Utopia in the Anthropocene


Lecture 2: Multispecies Justice and Narrative 


Lecture 3: Environmental Humanities and Cultural Change


Abstract｜Lecture 1: Salvage and Utopia in the Anthropocene

Fictional texts, especially but not only futuristic ones, have often foregrounded the motif of salvage over the last few decades, from the brothers Strugatsky and Frederik Pohl to Alastair Reynolds and China Miéville: salvage of the artifacts of long-extinct alien civilizations as well as salvage of a vanished civilization that is easily recognizable as our current one. The artist Adrián Villar Rojas has portrayed similar themes in his pseudo-geological installations. This lecture will explore how the gradual discovery and interpretation of civilizations of the past in these fictions and artworks map futures beyond the Anthropocene, sometimes in a dystopian mode, but sometimes to open up optimistic or even utopian visions of environmental futures. This lecture will argue that such texts and artworks translate and upgrade into narrative theoretical approaches to the Anthropocene articulated by Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and others who have sought to articulate paths forward from what they frame as the "ruins of capitalism." By confronting characters with the remnants of modernity from the perspective of profoundly different future societies, speculative fictions focused on salvage seek to develop blueprints for social and environmental futures that offer alternatives to differently construed present moments.


Abstract｜Lecture 2: Multispecies Justice and Narrative
The connection between struggles for social justice and environmental conservation has transformed environmentalisms across various regions over the last two decades under the labels of environmental justice, political ecology, and the environmentalism of the poor. Multispecies justice, a new paradigm that has emerged over the last decade, has sought to expand environmental justice thinking beyond the boundaries of the human species by reconceptualizing who or what is considered a subject of justice, who is included in communities of justice, and how concepts of justice differ across cultural communities. This lecture will explore what role different forms of narrative, from documentary films and popular scientific reporting to science fiction, play in defining and imagining multispecies communities of justice. It will focus on the strategies such narratives deploy to engage with more-than-human characters, plots, and policy decisions, in what ways they help concretize theories of multispecies justice, and the challenges they encounter in opening up a human – and typically anthropocentric – medium to more-than-human forms of experience.


Abstract｜Lecture 3: Environmental Humanities and Cultural Change

The sky is easier to engineer than the human brain,” one character says in the television series Extrapolations (2023) in a dispute over whether or not to initiate geoengineering to cool global temperatures. Her dialogue with another character, who argues that cultural change rather than technological intervention is needed to combat global warming, raises issues that are crucial to the Environmental Humanities. What is the role of culture in the engagement with environmental crises? If cultural change is indeed needed to solve environmental problems, what factors might bring about such change? This presentation will explore different theories of cultural change and the ways in which they have implicitly or explicitly shaped research in the Environmental Humanities.


Speaker's Short Biography

Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave. She is also producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary on urban parrots created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link. Her most recent book, a co-edited essay collection on Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, will be published in 2023. She is currently at work on a book entitled “Reclaiming Ecotopia: Science Fiction and Environmental Futures.”


Sponsor

National Science and Technology Council


Organizers

Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Farm for Change: Climate, Eco-poetics, Earth Justice

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Sun Yat-sen University

Kaohsiung Public Library

Department of English, Taiwan Normal University


Co-organizers

English and American Literature Association

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment