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2020 UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature
08 December 2020, 5:00 pm鈥�7:00 pm
Lecture title: "Climate Justice and Urban Narrative". This is an online event via Zoom.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Florian Mussgnug
Abstract:听Climate change cannot be dissociated from the stories we tell about climate. This lecture will approach climate narratives through climate justice to ask how the concept of justice inflects stories about climate change. It will explore the role that justice plays in a series of nonfiction books about climate change that focus primarily on urban futures听so as to highlight recurring story templates and their implications for arguments about justice. These narratives, like a great deal of cli-fi, rely on the age-old trope of the drowning city as a symbol for the passing of civilizations. But some recent narrative works, such as听Nguy峄卬-V玫 Nghi锚m-Minh's film听狈瓢峄沜听2030听(Water 2030, 2014)听 Kim Stanley Robinson's听New York 2140听(2017), reenvision the drowning city so as to investigate how climate change inflects basic decisions about the value of persons and property, and to offer new stories about inequality and the possibility of justice.听
Zoom link:听
Image credit:听狈瓢峄沜, dir.听Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo, 2014
About the Speaker
Professor Ursula K. Heise
Chair of the English Department at UCLA
Ursula K. Heise is co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at 皇家华人A's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany,听Japan,听and听Spain; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory.听Her books include, among others,听Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global听(Oxford University Press, 2008)听and听Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species听(University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science.听She is听co-editor of听The听Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities听(Routledge, 2017),听editor of the series听Natures, Cultures, and the Environment听with Palgrave, and co-editor of the series听Literature and Contemporary Thought听with Routledge.听听She is also producer and writer of听Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link.