list of attendees below!
Organizers:
Sina Farzin (University of Hamburg)
Emanuel Herold (University of Bremen)
BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION: ''Cli-fi'' aka ''CLIMATE CHANGE FICTION''
APRIL 22 – 23, 2016
BACKGROUNDER
''Since man-made and woman-made gobal warming seems, almost by definition, hard to imagine (after all, it’s never happened before) it gets short shrift. And here science can take us only so far. The scientists have done their job – they’ve issued every possible warning, flashed every red light. Now it’s time for the artists, whose role is to help us understand what things feel like.'' -- Bill McKibben,
Introduction to I’m with the Bears, p.3
Novels and short stories that depict research on climate change and/or its ecological and social ramifications have been gaining in prominence. In the U.S. in recent years, fiction that deals with climate change is being discussed in the media under the label “cli-fi” (climate fiction) and billed as a new genre.
From an interdisciplinary perspective, we are interested not so much in the question of literary classification as in the (self-)positioning of cli-fi as a boundary genre that picks up literary, scientific, political, and general societal discourses and articulates them in a new way.
The self-representations of authors as well as the comments by reviewers in scientific and literary media reveal a literature that actually aims to elucidate scientific knowledge and even attempts to inspire readers to political action.
Thus cli-fi serves as a cultural focal point for re-imagining the future socio-ecological consequences of global warming.
What sort of crossover is there between scientific and cli-fi, and what similarities and differences do we see, both in the texts themselves and in their effects on readers?
We want to discuss the potential social effects of cli-fi from various disciplinary perspectives on our workshop.
ABOUT ''FICTION MEETS SCIENCE''
FMS is a research and writers’ fellowship program that brings together sociologists, literary scholars, novelists, and scientists to examine the literary and social ramifications of a recent trend: an overall increase in the quantity of mainstream and literary fiction about science, and a shift in the ways that science is addressed in fiction. For more information see www.fictionmeetsscience.org
PARTICIPATION
Guests are welcome, but should register by sending an email to Sina.Farzin@wiso.unihamburg.de before March 15th, as space is limited. There is no registration or conference fee.
AGENDA
Friday, April 22 10:00
Welcome, Announcements and Introduction
10:45 ''Speculative Futures'' Sascha Dickel 11:35
BREAK
11:55 ''Fictional Facts: Communicating Climate Science in the Mirror of Literary Reception'' Sonja Fücker / Uwe Schimank 12:45 ''Cultural Constructions of Floods and Climate Change'' Anna Barcz / Thorsten Heimann 13:35
LUNCH (HWK Bistro)
14:45 ''Narrating Climate futures'' Alexandra Nikoleris / Johannes Stripple / Paul Tenngart 15:35 ''How Al Gore set the future on fire'' Jules Buchholtz 16:25 ''The climate of science-art and the art-science of the climate'' Simone Rödder 17:15
BREAK
17:45 Keynote:
''Anticipating Climate Change Futures'' John Urry 18:45
DINNER
3 Saturday, April 23 9:30 ''Framing Fiction with Fact: Science and Literature in the Peritexts of Climate Change Novels'' Sina Farzin / Emanuel Herold 10:20 ''The Climate Change Novel and the Figure of the Child'' Adeline Johns-Putra 11:10
BREAK
11:30 ''The Climate Change Romance'' Karsten Levihn-Kutzler 12:20 ''Nature Strikes Back'' Amy C. Chambers 13:10
LUNCH
Session Chairs: Sina Farzin; Susan M. Gaines; Emanuel Herold; Peter Weingart
No comments:
Post a Comment