Call for Papers EnviroLab Graduate Conference - (Un)Doing Catastrophe
EnviroLab’s Graduate Conference is a biennial event that gathers a community of graduate students and faculty working on environmental research projects. This year, the conference theme will be (Un)Doing catastrophe. Apply here until December 15th!
Conference Abstract
Is the Anthropocene a catastrophe? The polycrisis of social and environmental destruction captures attention as spectacle. Yet inherited narratives of catastrophe can flatten time, erasing histories and futures. Speaking of the “end of the world” overlooks the violences that Black, Indigenous, and other subaltern groups have already lived through, and the experiences and practices that have emerged with and after catastrophe (Davis and Todd 2017; Krenak 2020; Yusoff 2018). Catastrophe is both spectacular and ordinary. It announces itself in flood and fire and persists in slower registers: the tempos of illness, debt, and displacement. It accumulates in the afterlives of radiation and heat, in the half-lives of industrial time.
How then, might we think with catastrophe using both a critical eye and a curiosity about how it might open (or fail to foreclose) space to refuse, repair, and reimagine? This is especially pressing in the present context, where catastrophe has again become a ‘global’ concern. Capitalist exploitation has made catastrophe thinkable and fearful not just for those who have long lived it, but also for those very powerful groups invested in predicting, controlling, and governing their way out of it (Ghosh 2021). Moreover, the Enlightenment’s tools of prediction and control are becoming irrelevant in being able to contain the catastrophes they created (Beck 1995) and in finding alternatives before a point of no return (Petryna 2022).
In this sense, if catastrophe is both material and epistemic, then so must be the questions. How do we rethink ‘catastrophe’ so as to find new ways of being and acting in the world(s) we inhabit? How can ‘catastrophe’ be untied from notions of calculability, prediction, and control that organize ‘modern’ institutions? How have communities, individuals, social movements, places and histories remade life after catastrophe?
We gather work that is empirical and conceptual, critical and creative. We welcome thick description, careful history, maps, films, sound, and collaborations.
Possible topics include:
Temporalities of catastrophe: Black, Indigenous, and subaltern experiences; slow violence, and ongoing crises, cyclical and nonlinear time; afterlives and hauntings.
Epistemic crisis: the limits of modeling, insurance, risk, and disaster management.
Mediatized representations and receptions: Spectacular and ordinary ways of reporting, reading, and consuming catastrophe.
Refusal and repair: Practices of care, mutual aid, solidarity, refusing catastrophic harm.
Other worlds, other timelines: Utopianism, millenarianism, cosmologies, speculative futures.
Cited Works
Beck, U. (1996). World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society?: Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties: Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties. Theory, Culture & Society, 13(4), 1-32.
Davis, H. and Todd, Z. (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4), 761-780.
Ghosh, A. (2021). The nutmeg's curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. University of Chicago Press.
Krenak, A. (2020). Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. House of Anansi Press.
Petryna, A. (2022). Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change. Princeton University Press.
Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.