A conference on humanistic approaches to climate change, University of Bergen, Norway, 5-7 August 2020.
When we think about climate change, what first springs to mind is probably carbon emissions, extreme weather, draughts, floods, and melting icebergs. But climate change is just as much about time and timescales, pace and acceleration: Climate scientists incorporate lessons from the geological past in modeling possible future climates, politicians are coping with questions of how to make future societies resilient, and environmentalists are calling for immediate action.
Climate change challenges established human understandings of time. Macro-scales such as geological time and historical time become entangled, but just as important is the way changes in climate affect everyday life reasoning, based in personal experiences and immediacy. Climate change also interferes with family life, turning hopes and dreams for the future of “our children” into fear and worries.
This conference will approach how the wide range of more or less entangled temporalities of a changing climate are narrated, represented or expressed through performances and practices. We welcome papers discussing temporalities of climate change both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. The papers may examine quite different societal fields, such as everyday life, art, education, heritage, politics and science, for instance on topics such as:
Activism
The aesthetics of climate change
Anthropocene and time
Biodiversity and climate change
Cli-fi
Climate change in popular culture
Climate skepticism and notions of time
Historical time and deep time
The history of the notions of global warming and climate change
Media and climate
Museums and climate change
Indigenous notions of climate change
Political narratives on climate change
Queer culture and climate change
The temporality of weather and climate
Theory of history and temporality
Vernacular notions of climate and weather
The uses of history in climate politics
The conference is part of the project “The Future is Now: Temporality and Exemplarity in Climate Change Discourses” and is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Send an abstract (maximum 300 words) for a 20 minutes presentation to: futurenow@uib.no before March 1, 2020. The abstract must include: your name, affiliation and email address.
Confirmed keynotes are:
Kjersti Fløttum, Professor of French, University of Bergen, and the head of the LINGCLIM research group (Linguistic Representations of Climate Change Discourse and Their Individual and Collective Interpretations).
Rebekah Sheldon, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University, and the author of The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe.
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