This talk will consider two primary questions: what can literature help us understand about poverty that other fields, such as the social sciences, might not? And what can literature about poverty help us see about literature more generally that we might otherwise not grasp? I will open with a brief meditation on the UN Sustainable Development.
Goal 1: “End poverty in all its forms everywhere.” From there, I will examine recent theories of poverty in the US social sciences and cultural studies, including contributions by Matthew Desmond, Lennard Davis, and Saidiya Hartman, and then transition to a capsule history of the often contradictory ways poverty and the poor have been depicted in American literature, with a particular focus on novels and documentary texts from the 1930s, a period when poverty was in the forefront of many writers’ minds. I will conclude by suggesting the possibilities for literature to complicate and challenge some of the dominant frameworks of what historian Alice O’Connor calls “poverty knowledge”-prevailing social and political perspectives that have frequently blamed the poor themselves for the poverty they suffer. Even if it has not always delivered on this promise, literature has the potential to depict poverty and the poor otherwise, beyond mere lack, abjection, and bare life, and thus to open new ways for thinking about poverty’s causes, structural dynamics, and human impacts as well as the alternative epistemologies and modes of sociality which the poor develop in the face of their dispossession
SDG 1: Poverty and the Ends of American Literature | Joseph Entin
Joseph Entin’s most recent books are Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work (2023) and Until We’re Seen Public College Students Expose the Hidden Inequalities of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2024), co-edited with Jeanne Theoharis. In 2022, he co-edited with Clare Callahan, Irvin Hunt, and Kinohi Nishikawa a special issue of American Literature (94.3) on “How American Literature Understands Poverty.”
SDG 2: Food Sovereignty in Irish Farming Narratives: How Irish Texts Display UN Agriculture Sustainability Goals | Miriam Mara
The United Nations Sustainable Development (SDG) goals begin with the lofty goal of No Poverty (Goal 1) and move immediately into an equally lofty goal of Zero Hunger. Part of SGD 2, Zero Hunger, are important sub-points to make “all food systems… sustainable” and create a “100% increase in smallholder productivity and income.” Thus, the SGD calls for ideals consistent with the food sovereignty movement, which values small farms and ecologically sound farm practices. It also pushes against the European Union Common Agricultural Policy, which dictates farming tactics for all of the member countries, undercutting regional and national control over food and farm. Farm texts in post-crash Ireland uphold such anti-hunger, food sovereignty goals. In novels like Solace, Foster, The Beasts the Turned Away, The Searcher and The Wild Laughter, farm families are lauded or their end is lamented, and in the same space ecological damage to the island, even agricultural damage, also receives prominent treatment. These post-pastoral texts thus represent troubling ecological and cultural shifts currently undermining Ireland’s ability to feed itself. In Solace, fears about climate change erupt in the midst of non-linear structure suggesting attention to chronology and seasons. In Solace’s prologue, which is also prolepsis, the narrator explains: “when the forecast promised it would stay that way … red bands of high pressure stoking the country from the south, Tom and Mark readied to save the hay” (1). The text raises the image of gorgeous summer days not to portray carefree happiness or youth, but to display how warm weather must be exploited to complete farm labor. At the same time, the text hints darkly about the increase in such good weather that is hotter and often drier, challenging farmers’ ability to feed livestock and grow crops. In such ways, Solace and the other post-pastorals display threats to Irish farming and to SDG 2.
Miriam Mara investigates contemporary Irish literature and film, especially representations of embodiment, food, and hunger. Her second research stream includes research in health humanities and medical rhetoric. She is a professor of English at Arizona State University. During the 2016-17 academic year, Dr. Mara collected interview data from health care professionals in Kenya as part of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for her book Globalism and Gendering Cancer published by Routledge in 2020. Currently, she is expanding work on embodiment and identity in Irish literature with a new book project titled Food Sovereignty in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Farm Narratives. It will analyze on the ground agricultural and ecological practice as well as a group of contemporary Irish texts about farm life, including novels like Belinda McKeon’s Solace and John Connell’s memoir, The Cow Book.
SDG 3: Cultures of Life and Death | Lucy Burke
What we understand by the intertwined concepts of health and wellbeing, is far from straightforward, with both terms presenting what Raymond Williams termed – in his endeavour to identity “keywords” in culture – “active” problems of meaning. With reference to selected novels by Barbara Kingsolver and Ruth Ozeki, this paper explores the distinctive contribution of recent literary fiction to current debates about health, wellbeing and ageing in the broader context of the current ecological crisis, focusing specifically on the ways in which both writers foreground the interconnectedness and vulnerability of human and non-human life in order to imagine new ways in which we might think about wellbeing as a communal responsibility that cannot be disentangled from our obligations to the environment.
Lucy Burke works at the intersection of cultural and literary disability studies and the critical medical humanities. She has published widely on the representation of dementia and learning disability in literature and film, and she is member of the Wellcome Institute Committee (Medical Humanities arm); steering group of the Northern Network of Medical Humanities Research, Editorial Board Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Advisory Board Wellcome Trust Living/Bodies/Objects and Edinburgh University Press, Contemporary Cultural Studies in Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine. She is currently completing two forthcoming monographs, Why Should We Care? (Manifesto Press), and Dementia Culture (Liverpool University Press)
SDG 4: How Do Novels Educate? | Jesse Cordes Selbin
The fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal aims to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Without denying the need to support and increase access to formal institutions of education, this talk asks what pedagogical work might be accomplished in their absence, primarily through the medium of the novel. In earlier eras of limited formal education, novels were understood to bear a wide range of educational functions, even when oral reading was required to reach audiences with limited literacy. This talk primarily explores how nineteenth-century social critics and novelists—including familiar figures (George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë) and now-forgotten ones (Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant)—committed fiction to pedagogical goals like the expansion of sympathy, perspectives, defamiliarization of ordinary life, development of critical faculties, and heightening of aesthetic perception. Finally, the talk connects historic uses of “the novel as an educator” with more modern and contemporary works of prose fiction that likewise seek to cultivate “lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
Jesse Cordes Selbin is assistant professor of English at Gettysburg College, where she teaches long-nineteenth-century British and global Anglophone literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of close reading and the rise of “critical thinking” as a popular ideal, which is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Her writing has appeared in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), ELH (English Literary History), Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, the Victorian Periodicals Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Teaching Sociology, and the Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom project.
SDG 5: Gendered Timelines: Literary Acts of Feminist and Queer Temporal Resistance | Bonnie Zare
This talk proposes a new interpretive lens-time-to examine how gender inequality is structured and resisted. It argues that dominant, linear conceptions of time which are rooted in capitalist, teleological paradigms obscure alternative temporalities that are vital to feminist and queer liberation. Linear time disciplines the body toward productivity and measurable outcomes, while cyclical time-based on the rhythms of nature, caregiving, and embodiment ―remains devalued, feminized, and ignored by policy and praxis.
Drawing on feminist temporal theory and literary analysis, this talk examines how literary texts make visible the gendered politics of time. First, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Priyamvada Purushottam’s The Purple Line (2012) expose the imposition of coercive reproductive timelines, where the temporal blockages imposed by a forced pregnancy or the birth of a second girl child foreclose women’s life trajectories. In Salma’s “Toilets” (2009; 2012) and M.M. Vinodini’s “Block” (2012; 2021), the denial of public infrastructure becomes a denial of temporal mobility—interrupting daily cycles and degrading the dignity of female embodiment. Finally, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir (2022) resists a standard timeline of gender development, offering instead a non-linear, cyclical unfolding of identity.
Bonnie Zare is the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech. She has made yearly stays in India since 2002, focusing on Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. She focuses on discourses of identity, feminism and activism in contemporary India, and her most recent work looks at casteism. Zare’s articles have appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum, Humanity and Society, and South Asian Review among others. She is on the International Board of Aarti for Girls, an organization which helps low-income girls in Andhra Pradesh.
SDG 6: Reading for Water | Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall, Charne Lavery
As the limitations of 20th century water planning and management become apparent, the idea of the hydrological cycle has shifted to the hydrosocial cycle. In the former, water is an abstract, ahistorical and secular resource; in the latter, a substance shaped socio-ecologically.
While this scholarship has been invaluable in broadening understandings of water, the ‘social’ in ‘hydrosocial’ has generally been translated into a social science, rather than a humanities register. While certainly embedded in the ‘hydrosocial’ with a commitment to water as a human right, SDG 6 and the scholarship around it have likewise been social scientific in orientation.
This talk explores what it means to bring literary and cultural perspectives to these debates, exploring how one might ‘read for water’ across a range of texts. Drawing on southern African and postcolonial material, the presentation will set out a rich set of methods: these follow the sensory, political and agentive power of water across literary texts, tracking rivers, rain, streams, tunnels and sewers; connecting atmospheric, surface and ground water; describing competing hydrological traditions and
hydro-epistemologies.
Isabel Hofmeyr will provide an overview of ‘Reading for Water’ with discussion of the concept of hydrocolonialism.
Sarah Nuttall will set out the concept of pluviality, a concept she has developed in relation to heavy rainfall and flooding, its timescapes and material and textual conditions.
Charne Lavery will explore her work on the seas and oceans, and in particular her research on the vertical Indian Ocean. This research investigates the literary and cultural mediation of this southern ocean’s submarine depths in their ecological and material specificity, drawing into consideration also SDG 14: Life Below Water.
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid, editor, most recently, of Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis (Duke UP) and coeditor, with Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, of Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (Routledge).
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and was Global Distinguished Professor at New York University from 2013 to 2022. She has worked extensively on print culture and book history and has combined these with environmental and oceanic themes. Recent publications include Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022) and a co-edited special issue on “Reading for Water” in Interventions 24 (3) 2022. From 2018 to 2023, she co-directed a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados.
Charne Lavery is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her book Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English was published by Palgrave in 2021. She has also published three co-edited collections: Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2023), Reading from the South (Wits Press 2023) and Reading for Water (Routledge 2024).
Achieving SDG 6 - Opportunities and Challenges | Dr. Balakrishna Pisupati
Sustainable Development Goal 6 aims to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030. Despite progress in expanding access to safe water and sanitation services globally, the goal remains significantly off-track. As of 2024, over 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and 3.5 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation services. Additionally, nearly 80% of wastewater is discharged untreated into the environment, and over 2 billion people live under conditions of high water stress. Key challenges include inadequate infrastructure investment, water pollution, over-extraction of groundwater, fragmented water governance, and the growing impacts of climate change. Rural and marginalized communities continue to face disproportionate access issues. However, promising opportunities lie in integrated water resources management (IWRM), nature-based solutions, decentralized sanitation technologies, and stronger policy coordination across sectors. In India, flagship initiatives such as the Jal Jeevan Mission, Swachh Bharat Mission, and Namami Gange Programme have significantly accelerated progress, but concerns around water quality, regional disparities, and groundwater depletion persist. To achieve SDG 6 by 2030, urgent and integrated action is needed at global, national, and local levels. This includes scaling up investments, empowering communities, adopting innovative technologies, and fostering cross-sectoral partnerships. Ensuring clean water and sanitation for all is not only essential for public health and environmental sustainability but is also a foundation for achieving many other SDGs.
Dr. Balakrishna Pisupati is an internationally renowned conservation and development specialist with close to three decades of experience working at national, regional and international levels, holding positions such as the Head of Environment Policy at UNEP, Vice-Chancellor, TransDisciplinary University (TDU, India), Chief of Biodiversity, Land Law and Governance programmes at United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, Kenya), Senior Policy Fellow at Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI, Norway), Chairman, National Biodiversity Authority-Government of India (NBA, India), Coordinator, Biodiplomacy Programme at United Nations University (UNU-IAS, Japan), Head, Regional Biodiversity Programme for Asia at the World Conservation Union (IUCN, Sri Lanka), Head, Biodiversity and Biotechnology programme at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF, India). He currently is the Country Director of UNEP in India, focusing on issues of science policy interfaces, policy coherence, environmental governance and the related.
SDG 7: Bicycling in Paradise: On Radical Cadence and Just Futures in the End Times| Stacey Balkan
In Energy and Equity (1973), Ivan Illich made a powerful case for a threshold beyond which the amount of energy expended has an inverse relationship to collective flourishing–a sentiment that reflected contemporary debates around the biophysical limits of economic growth. In this paper, I revisit Illich with the hindsight of decades of political struggle against the forces of a planetary “petropatriarchy” lately emboldened by renewed calls to “drill baby drill.” I then turn to speculative fictions, such as those collected in Elly Blue’s Biketopia series, that imagine a post-oil horizon neither powered by invisible labor, nor beset by scarcity.
Stacey Balkan is Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as a faculty affiliate for the Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights and the School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability. She is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia UP, 2022) and the co-editor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State UP, 2021). Stacey is also a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil School with whom she collaborated on Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minnesota UP, 2022). Her work on energy justice and just futures is also forthcoming in several volumes including Energized: 101 Words for a New Politics of Energy (West Virginia UP), the Routledge Companion to Literature and Environment, and Energy Humanities: Options for Teaching (Modern Language Association).
SDG 8: “'They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh!’: Melville, Moby-Dick, and the value of writing.”| Cindy Weinstein
In September of 1877, Melville expressed his frustrations to his cousin Catherine G. Lansing about the indignities of work. He had, of course, written about this discontent in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and most famously Moby-Dick, or The Whale. But the value of writing had not yet curdled for Melville when his masterpiece was published in 1851. The estrangement of labor, as examined by Karl Marx, as demanded by Ahab, as enshrined by political compromises with pro-slavery forces, could be overcome through literature. This is the project – upending the means of literary production to overcome alienation — of Melville’s masterpiece.
Cindy Weinstein is the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology. She has written several monographs on US literature and is currently at work on “Always Nevermore: The Unending Death of Edgar Allan Poe.” She has also edited, co-edited, and contributed to many essay collections, including the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (with Robert S. Levine). Most recently, she wrote, with neurologist Dr. Bruce Miller, Finding the Right Words:
A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), which has been awarded the 2022 Memoir Prize for Books.
SDG 9: Groundless Empire and Grounded Resistance | Clare Pettitt
This talk asks if the literature of the nineteenth-century can tell us anything about vulnerability and infrastructure that might be useful to us in our current moment. The imperialist military-technological triumphalism of the nineteenth century has left a global legacy which is material, environmental, and political. My paper will look at a particular example: the introduction of the electric telegraph into India under colonial British rule. In my wider project about the pre-history of the digital, I set out to show how the digital emerged from an uneven and unfair world and how new media continue to perpetuate those inequalities. For example, 5G coverage is now at 84 per cent in high-income countries, but only 4 per cent in low-income countries. In The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), John Durham Peters suggests that new media always “confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.” In my talk I discuss literary responses from India and Britain to new communications technologies as they emerged in the nineteenth century, showing how writers paid particular attention to the relationship of the telegraph with Indian nature and landscape. Using works by Fakir Mohan Senapati; Dinabandhu Mitra; Rabindranath Tagore; Elizabeth Gaskell; Rudyard Kipling; Karl Marx; and others, I argue that literature itself can be infrastructural. The paper concludes by looking to the future. The current climate crisis offers an opportunity for the dismantlement of colonial infrastructures and the re-mantlement of our shared social environment through work for infrastructural sustainability and the equitable distribution of technologies.
[See UN Report Synergy Solutions for a World in Crisis: Tackling Climate and SDG Action Together (2023)]
Content warning: this paper contains descriptions of colonial violence.
Clare Pettitt holds the Grace 2 Chair in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research is in the long nineteenth century. She is currently finishing a trilogy which investigates the concept of ‘seriality’ as it came to underpin social and political life in Europe and its colonies in ways that persist today. This research focuses on print culture alongside emerging digital technologies and media forms in the nineteenth century. She also works on the history of the material book and the historical production of ideas of authorship, ownership, originality and authority. Her books include Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (2004) and Dr Livingstone, I presume?’: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (2007). Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815-1848 (2020) won the NAVSA Book Prize [North American Victorian Studies Association] and was co-winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and of the EsPRit Prize [European Society for Periodical Studies]. Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form came out in 2022. Pettitt is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press ‘Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’ monograph series, and an editor of Cambridge Quarterly.
SDG 10:Chain of Oppression: An Aquapelagic Reading of Industrial Fishing in Port of Lies | Nick Tsung-Che Lu
Tang Fu-jui’s Port of Lies is a Taiwanese crime fiction that critiques the complex network of political and corporate interests undergirding Taiwan’s fishing industry and the industry’s historical exploitation of Indigenous and migrant fishers. Using Philip Hayward’s idea of the aquapelago, this talk reads industrial fishing represented in the novel not simply as a mode of production, but as a more-than-human aquapelago that sustains itself by creating and maintaining specific social and human-nature relations. The talk first reviews Tang’s representation of the major forms of violence in industrial fishing under the conceptual framework of hydrocolonialism to provide a historical context. With an aquapelagic reading, it then highlights the moments in the novel in which industrial fishing sustains itself by reproducing specific subjectivity, social relation, and human-nature relation. The talk concludes with a reflection on ways to decolonise human’s fishing activities.
Nick Tsung-Che Lu is a scholar and educator in contemporary Anglophone, World, and East Asian literatures, and teaches at Marist College, USA. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial theory, Asian Diaspora studies, social justice, and human geography.
Lu is a co-editor of Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice (2023). His other academic works have appeared in Research in African Literatures, Shima, and other venues.
SDG 11: Sharing Spaces and Thriving Together : A Posthumanist Material Feminist Perspective | Christine Daigle
A posthumanist perspective that rejects human exceptionalism and favors a postanthropocentrism entails a reconceptualization of the human, its place in the world, and its relations with nonhuman beings, including the various ecosystems and the Earth system itself. How must we rethink ourselves as radically entangled beings that are always part of multiple ecologies of belongings? This involves having to examine how we design the spaces in which we live and work and aim for designs that favour the thriving of both humans and nonhumans, instead of privileging human well-being at all costs. In fact, as I will argue, even an approach that focuses on sustainability is inappropriate. Endeavours driven by sustainability are in fact working toward the well-being of humans, especially future generations. Their goal is to figure out ways to sustain our way of life. However, it is that very way of life that is problematic as it establishes hierarchies among beings, human and nonhuman, and allows for regimes of oppression, violence, and extraction that, in the end, are damaging for all, including those who fancy themselves as protected from environmental violence. We can, however, imagine and build new ways of sharing spaces and thriving as radically entangled beings.
Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University (St. Catharines, Canada). She is the author of Posthumanist Vulnerability. An Affirmative Ethics (Bloomsbury 2023) and is preparing a monograph on the concept of joyful extinction.
She is co-editor of the series Posthumanism in Practice (Bloomsbury) and Editor of Interconnections. A Journal of Posthumanism. Her research is at the intersection of posthumanist material feminist theory and environmental (post)humanities.
SDG 12: Of Gossamer and Granite: Utopian Literature, and the Education of Desire |
SDG 12 is intended to help “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns” around the world. Some elements of its accompanying targets and indicators focus on language and communication practices alongside empirical measurements. Target 12.8, for example, expresses the goal of ensuring by 2030 that “people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature.” Such a goal suggests a longstanding recognition that the struggle against climate change and related environmental crises is as much a struggle of culture, politics, and communication as a scientific one. How do we teach people to want to consume and produce sustainably? In his writings on utopian literature, the critic Miguel Abensour referred to the work of this genre as “the education of desire.” This talk will discuss a few utopian texts from the turn of the twentieth century, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905), as well as one more recent utopian text, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), to help us think about the role of utopian literature in educating our environmental desire and teaching people to want more sustainable ways of life.
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Professor of English and Chair of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches classes in literature and the environmental humanities. She is the author of three books, the most recent of which, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton, 2021), received the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies and Honorable Mention for the ASLE Ecocriticism Book Prize. It was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year. Her current book project is tentatively titled “The Industrial Ocean: Water, Coal, and Culture in the Nineteenth Century.”
SDG 13: Climate Fictions and Narrative Fundamentals | Jennifer Wenzel
This talk considers what it would mean to understand literature in relation to the imperative of climate action, as outlined in SDG 13. How can prose fiction (and other literary forms) be enlisted in struggles to understand and work against climate change, and what are the pitfalls of doing so? In what ways has literary imagining been complicit in processes and habits of mind that have contributed to global warming? What challenges does climate change pose to fundamental assumptions about narrative? How can literature help us to imagine and realize climate justice?
Jennifer Wenzel is a scholar of postcolonial studies and environmental and energy humanities jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School and a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. She has held fellowships from Mellon, ACLS, NEH, and Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies. Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. Her recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, was a Finalist for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and shortlisted for the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Shorter works have appeared in journals including Alif, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, PMLA, Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture, Research in African Literatures, Resilience, and Substance. A new collection, Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, co-edited with Imre Szeman, is forthcoming in April 2025. Her current book project is titled “Beyond the Fossil- Fueled Imagination: How (and Why)to Read for Energy.”
SDG 14: Eating at the Sea: Blue Humanities and Ocean Science Literacy | Cecilia Åsberg
“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere” (Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937).
The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity —(in for instance my own militarized “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) — have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans, sea beds and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). Territorial claims and struggles over resources, power and knowledge meet here multispecies fantasies with loose, but promising, ties to marine biology. I will by exploring some examples try to provide counternarratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality infused by insights from vulnerability studies and the general framework of SDG 14 Life Below Water.
Prof Cecilia Åsberg (Linköping University, Sweden) is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar with a focus on the technologies, biologies, and ecologies of the now, and the arts of living with changes on a damaged planet. She is a pioneer of Gender Studies, Blue and Environmental Humanities and feminist STS studies in Sweden (Science and Technology Studies). In 2008 she founded The Posthumanities Hub, an interdisciplinary collaborative centre that has helped to reformulate the relationship between humans and nature. She has published extensively on cyborg feminist approaches to embodiment and environment, but also worked on biodiversity, waste and visual AI-technologies. A recent publication is “Promises of Cyborgs: Feminist Practices of Posthumanities (Against the Nested Crises of the Anthropocene)”. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 32.2 (2024): 125–145.
SDG 15: Reading Rekindling Fictions: SDG 15 and the Making of Speculative Future Natures | Sarah Bezan
This lecture proposes the word “rekindling” to describe members of a revived extinct species. Drawing on the root of extinct (from the Latin extinguere, meaning a flame “extinguished”), I argue that “rekindling fictions” ignite a spark of imagination that enables us to speculate on possible future natures. These fictions arguably offer a response to the ambitious call of SDG 13 (‘Life on Land’), which seeks to determine solutions to extinction and plummeting rates of biodiversity.
Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the School of English & Digital Humanities at University College Cork, where she is also a founding member of the Radical Humanities Laboratory. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Sarah’s work focuses on de-extinction/species revival, necro-ecologies, and speculative future natures. Her first monograph in progress, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture, is under advance contract with Manchester University Press.
SDG 16: Cardinal Points and the Global South; or, The Justice of Linguistic Access | Alfred J. López
We begin by posing a problem, in the form of an opening metaphor, then offer a provisional hypothesis. The problem: To fly from Mexico City to New Delhi, one must make one or two stops in Europe; perhaps Schiphol or Munich. Likewise, whether to displace epistemologies, cosmologies, or bodies, from South to South, it seems one must always stop North. Mahler and Armillas-Tiseyra also correctly emphasize the enduring challenge of language—literally of linguistic access—for many scholars of the Global South. To examine literatures from the Global South, draw South-South connections and inferences, or ponder canonizations of non-European/US literatures, we have too often met physically and intellectually in the North. The notion that the Global South is premodern and should strive to become more like the North, socially, culturally, economically, politically, insidiously ignores the complex histories of the sovereign states and territories south of the US-Mexico border, of the Gibraltar Strait, east of the European Union.
Alfred J. López is Professor and Head of the Department of English at Purdue University. He is the author of six books, including José Martí: A Revolutionary Life (U Texas P, 2014), the definitive biography of Cuba’s greatest national hero. His most recent books are A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and his Afterlife (2022) and The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Global South, co-edited with Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (2023), both from Routledge. His seventh and eighth books in progress are The Cambridge Introduction to José Martí and The Cambridge Companion to Cuban Literature, both forthcoming in 2027.
López’s essays have appeared in American Literature, Comparative Literature, Cuban Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Huffington Post, among many other journals and periodicals. He is also the founding editor of The Global South (Indiana UP 2007-), the leading journal of globalization and global South studies. López joined the English faculty at Purdue in 2007, and has also taught courses and/or directed programs in Latin American and Latino Studies, Global Studies, Comparative Literature, and American Studies.
He is a proud first-generation college student, and the son of Cuban immigrants.
SDG 17: Knowledge-sharing in a Digital Commons | Seán Cubitt
What is knowledge? Three aspects are important for UNESCO’s sustainability goals. First, knowledge is the accumulated wisdom we inherit from past generations in the form of language, mathematics, logic, tools and techniques. Second, knowledge is the shared practice of making new things with the legacies of the past, things we in turn can hand on to coming generations. Third, in our times all too often knowledge is locked into the black boxes of machines and forced to serve the goal of profit. It is said that the opposite of profit is debt, but just as private property deprives everyone else, there can be no profit without debt. The debtor promises that everything they will earn in future will go to paying for the present. As the instruments of present profit deprive the living of future advances, debt deprives work of a future – the potential for change. Intellectual property – that oxymoron – reduces the future to a vanishing point. How can living communities overcome the seizure of common inheritance and creativity for data capture, platform economics and profit-driven artificial intelligence? Can the living form new alliances with the ancestors trapped in technologies to create a new commons and a future worthy of the name?
Seán Cubitt is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, The Practice of Light, Finite Media, Anecdotal Evidence, and two volumes on aesthetic politics, Truth and Good. He writes on ecocritical approaches to the history and philosophy of media and media arts.
