The politics of climate narratives: An age of polycrisis

For the longest time, climate narratives have been defined as that which is strictly “about” climate change (Mehnert 2016). In these talks, and the following roundtable, we will discuss how the climate crisis itself is increasingly interrelated with other crises, resulting in a polycrisis(Albert 2024). Polycrisis is a term used frequently within natural and social sciences, yet it naturally impacts and is impacted by the arts. As climate crisis mutates into polycrisis, surprising aesthetic registers come into being, challenging limited ideas of genre boundaries. We aim to open a conversation on how the political aspects of literature is foregrounded in a new wave of crisis fiction or cri-fi. We also ask how crisis narratives complicate the common genre trope of speculative fiction being able to imagine better worlds. Are new crisis narratives able to move beyond merely representing our current crisis? What unexpected aesthetic modes bloom from the discrepancy between the emotional experience and the knowledge of the polycrisis? What ambivalent, minor and ugly affects may appear in the monstrous encounter with a world breaking down? How does crisis narratives negotiate the complex inter-relations of climate crisis with capitalism, class and gender?

BIO
Rebecca Duncan is Associate Professor in English at Linnaeus University. She is PI on Resources and Energy in South African Literature (Vetenskapsrådet, 2024-7), and co-coordinator of the research cluster for Ecology, Culture and Coloniality. Recent publications include Monsters of the Capitalocene (forthcoming Cambridge UP).

Agnethe Bennedsgaard is a PhD Fellow in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University. Her research uses planetary comparativism to investigate new kinds of speculative feminst environmental fiction from Latin America and East Asia. She is published in Passage, World Literature Today and Standart.

Leonardo Nolé is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Syddansk Universitet  and a member of the Center for Mobilizing Post-Anthropocentric Climate Action (PACA). His researches on Capitalocene narratives and contemporary energy imaginaries, and his postdoc is entitled “Addressing Climate Anxiety Using Flash Fiction in the Classroom”

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af AIIM – Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images, Lotte Philipsen og Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

Supported by Research programmes:

• Arts, Aesthetics and Communities
• Environmental Media and Aesthetics
• Literacy Cultures

Poster

Program