Overview: This conference seeks to consolidate emergent scholarship and artworks that explore the power of narrative to motivate climate-conscious action. The emphasis in this conference is on climate narratives in practice; in other words, it is concerned with works that apply these narratives in various public-facing contexts.
The study of climate fiction, texts exploring the impact of climate change has proliferated alongside the now-familiar call for better narrative accounts of the Anthropocene. At the same time, it is not enough to generate simply more of these narratives; the crucial task remains to evaluate how they are taken up by readers and audiences and make meaning in the world. To this end, the conference’s presentations will be categorized within three areas where it is possible to assess this literature’s potential impact: the implementation of climate narratives in the classroom (pedagogy); empirical studies of climate fiction’s reception (empirical ecocriticism); and artworks that embed narratives for the purpose of inspiring greater climate consciousness (climate activism). Rather than repeat calls for more and better representations of climate change in fiction, this conference takes stock of the most recent innovations in eco-storytelling and asks: how should the urgency of the climate crisis (and the resulting call to action) affect our expectations from, and experience of, reading literature today? And what evidence emerges for fiction’s capacity to inspire greater ecological awareness?
Submission Guidelines: Please submit your 250-word abstract for 20-min presentations and a short bio to clifi.conference [at] gmail.com (clifi[dot]conference[at]gmail[dot]com) by November 1, 2024.
Accepted speakers will be notified by December 31, 2024. The conference is scheduled to take place in person. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the conference organizers at yazell [at] sdu.dk (yazell[at]sdu[dot]dk) and lnole [at] sdu.dk (lnole[at]sdu[dot]dk)