WINTER SERIES 2021
Dystopian worlds: The end or beginning of times?
Fin by Mike Pitman
We are living in dystopian times. The global COVID-19 pandemic has transformed speculative apocalyptic fiction novels into a stark reality. It has been a year of reckonings, as the pandemic has painfully laid bare the interconnectedness of the world as well as the socio-economic, racial and structural inequalities underlying the disproportionate impact around the globe. In the meantime, nature has been running its own course, leaving traces of dystopian destruction. Sustained Arctic melting, unprecedented bushfires in Australia and apocalyptic wildfires in The United States; and record wildfires in the Amazon have prompted a group of scientists to call for action: “Fire in Paradise: a Declaration of World Scientists”. On top of lockdown, famine, floods or drought, millions of farmers in Asia and Africa witnessed swarms of desert locust decimating farmlands, invoking Biblical prophesies. Amidst political chaos, pestilence and environmental disasters, we ask ourselves: what have we done wrong? Times of societal and environmental crises give rise to end-of-time tales and stories of moral failure, but they may also foster ideas about new beginnings and brighter futures.
We are very excited to launch our Winter Series on ‘Dystopian Worlds: the end or beginning or time’ . For this series, we invited thematic perspectives on the apocalypse & counter-apocalypse in relation to weather, climate and nature and how this is lived culturally and scientifically in the past, present and imagined, desired and predicted for the future. The perspectives that we received from all over the globe, show above all, the power of the environmental humanities that bring into view the rich repertoires through which humans construct, select, imagine, comfortably ignore, ritualise, live through and give meaning to climatic and environmental changes at the intersection of a multitude of other crises. Despite the pandemic and nature’s ravaging force that held sway in 2020, not all tales are of destruction, however. In fact, the value of the environmental humanities becomes vividly clear when the abstract language of climate science is juxtaposed with human accounts of social life, which may also prompt the need for counter-apocalypses.
Read full CFP here
Uncertain Times: Farmers, the Pandemic, and Climate Change in Galapagos | By Julio Rodríguez Stimson
Image by Joshua Vela Fonseca
In Julio Rodríguez Stimson’s perspective, “Coping with Uncertain Times: Farmers, the Pandemic, and Climate Change in Galapagos” we learn how an immediate crisis can eclipse other risks. While farmers’ livelihoods are still threatened by invasive species and potential drought, the collapsed tourist industry, increasing inequality, and the ongoing pandemic are more prominent worries. In the meantime, climate change continues to act as a threat multiplier, with potentially catastrophic consequences…
Image by Karl Dudman
….Against the manifold media accounts that have drawn parallels between the Covid-19 and the climate crisis, we invite you to read an important critique voiced in Karl Dudman’s blog ‘If you think Covid-19 is a dress rehearsal, you may be at the wrong play’, originally written at the beginning of the first 2020 lockdown . Dudman argues that, ultimately, to gauge how these societal risks are perceived we must understand how those risks behave as phenomena. As the climate sector retunes its activities towards futures and opportunities in a post-coronavirus world, it must keep in its sights the ways these crises communicate, the geopolitical landscapes upon which they fall, and the values they engage…
Not OK | By Pr. Cymene Howe and Pr. Dominic Boyer
Courtesy of Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer
…With a great dose of humour, narrated from the perspective of Ok mountain – the first major Icelandic glacier to fall victim to climate change – anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer worked with Icelandic filmmaker Ragnar Hansson to make a documentary about what losing their first glacier means to Icelanders. We are thrilled to be able to share “Not Ok” with you, a movie that doesn’t focus on the typical spectacle of melting ice sheets but rather explores the emotional complexity of how humans deal with climate change…
Living with ‘Bad’ Weather in the Kashmir valley | By Arif Hayat Nairang
‘After the snow’. PC: Author
….We also find the power of humour in the face of multiple crises in Arif Hayat Nairang’s perspective “End Time Humour; Living with “Bad” Weather in the Kashmir Valley”. Amidst an imposed military clampdown in Kashmir, intersecting with the onset of the long and cold Himalayan winter, doing anthropological “fieldwork” at home gets a surprising new meaning…
Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love: Waiting at the end of Kachemak Bay | By Hannah Rose Bradley
The ontological crisis of the Anthropocene | By Dr. Luis Fernández Carril
Image by Hannah Bradley
…Living through the pandemic during fieldwork, requires creativity, resilience but also patience. In Hannah Rose Bradley’s poetic account “Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love: Waiting at the end of Kachemak Bay” we learn that thinking about the end of times is indeed of all times. Being stuck at Kachemak Bay, we are brought back to 1956, when prophet and messiah Krishna Venta took a group of his followers on an epic road trip from the Santa Susana Mountains in Northern LA up through Canada into Alaska, looking for the site for a second Wisdom Knowledge Faith and Love Fountain of the World. The ideal of the Alaskan wilderness obviously provided a contrasting “outside” and “beyond” the doomed teleology of the modern world. The End was coming….
…Why does humanity fail to act upon the climate crisis despite its overwhelming scientific evidence? In a critical perspective on the ‘ontological crisis of the Anthropocene’, IPCC lead author Dr. Luis Fernández Carril moves beyond the popular ‘information deficit model’ to address this conundrum. Instead, Dr. Fernández Carril seeks explanations in our mental configurations, values and principles forged in prosperity that prevent us from adapting to a changing world. The great task ahead, he argues, will be to forge the emergence of an ontology of precariousness with views, principles and values such as interdependence between living beings, compassion and solidarity…
Modelling Migration in the Apocalypse | By Christian Espinosa Schatz
Encounters of 2 SFs | By Hacer Goren
…The vital importance of the humanities and the need for counter-apocalypses as envisaged in climate models, becomes particularly salient in Christian Espinosa Schatz’ perspective “Climate models predict the future through algorithmic extrapolation”. While climate models predict the future through algorithmic extrapolation, the future involves much more than climate. Underpinned by the hegemonic work of quantitative models, the past decade has seen a proliferation of climate migration models. Yet, Schatz argues that since modelling exercises of such a complex social issue as migration blur the boundaries between science and fiction, it is time that the model must give its predictive authority over to the humanists…
Fabrizio Terranova, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, 2016. Courtesy: the artist and Studio Graphoui, Brussels. https://www.frieze.com/article/books-50
…Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), in Hacer Goren’s perspective you will experience the “Encounter of two string figures”. One of them (String Figure A) had once existed as bacteria, who had been trapped for thousands of years in Siberian permafrost. It has been released with the Huge Ice Melt. The other one (String Figure B) had once existed as a virus and lied dormant for a while in Alaskan permafrost soils…
Cinematic Incursions into the Anthropocene: Roland Emmerich, Dystopia and Ontology | By António Carvalho and Mariana Riquito
Desert Arcologies and Path Dependencies | By Sayd Randle
‘Metrópole’ by Bruno Oliveira as part of the "Utopia/Dystopia – A Paradigm Shift" exhibition at the MAAT in Lisbon (22 March to 21 August of 2017). Image by Bruno Lopes
…Taking a broader, cultural view, António Carvalho and Mariana Riquito explore how the narrative tensions of the Anthropocene play out in the medium of disaster movies. They focus in particular on the work of Roland Emmerich, whose dystopian visions of the imperiled earth offer an 'ontological theatre' in which the anxieties and uncertainties of contemporary life are publicly negotiated…
Image by Sayd Randle
…. Contemplating the harsh social and environmental realities unfolding in the suburbs of Phoenix, Sayd Randle compares experimental visions of eco-modernist desert utopia from reality and fiction. With each blurring elements of fantasy and ambivalent realism, it is ultimately the corrupting influence of power and politics that endanger urban futures in arid Arizona.