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This new lecture series will feature five distinguished speakers to explore a range of thought-provoking topics spanning Caribbean narratives, environmental justice and history and the connections between colonialism and ecology.
ABOUT THE TALK:
In Fall of 2024, the United Nations hosted hundreds of global delegates at The Summit of the Future, a monumental effort to forge a new international consensus on how to safeguard the future. For the first time, humanists, including me, were an officially-invited part of the delegation, and at the table for consideration of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ challenge to take specific steps to “make a tangible difference in people’s lives and account for the livlihoods and resilience of future generations.”
In this lecture, I will explain the role of climate fiction in the lead-up to my invitation (as a humanist) to come to the United Nations. Then, I’ll dive into a discussion of Day After Tomorrow (2004), the most celebrated “cli-fi” film to date, and bring Solar Storms (1994), an indigenous-authored novel that has only recently been considered part of an emerging climate fiction canon into the discussion. I connect these two seemingly unrelated pieces because they can both be connected in interesting ways to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the massive Atlantic Ocean current system which affects climate, sea levels and global weather system.
My discussion explores how both film and novel create characters that draw attention to the value of “futures thinking,” a practice foregrounded at the Summit of the Future and, for over 20 years, by environmental humanists interested in impowering individuals, students, governments, societies, and organizations to imagine and shape alternative, desirable futures, particularly in the face of accelerating ecosystemic disruptions associated with climate change (like AMOC). With Solar Storms as an example not of “cli-fi” per se, but as an example of a genre Black Studies professor and spoken word artist Walida Imarisha calls ‘visionary fiction,’ I explore why we might want to go beyond futures thinking to ‘cosmos thinking,’ a concept linked to cosmovisions, cosmopolitics and the indigenous-authored Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change (2012).
Building on my previous work around indigenous cosmopolitics and the environmental humanities (Adamson and Davis 2017, Adamson and Monani 2016), I propose a ‘cosmovisionary archive’ that would facilitate cosmos-thinking by gathering together unruly, mixed genres (ancient oral tradition, almanacs, visionary fictions, blockbuster films) that “account for the livlihoods and resilience of future generations” and acknowledge Earth systems (like AMOC) as ‘persons’ with rights ‘to regenerate biocapacity and continue vital cycles’ (Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change 2012).
AFFILIATED EVENT:
On March 21st, Speculative lIfe will host a reading session to prepare for Adamson and Armiero’s lectures:
Join us at 10-11:30 AM in the Speculative Life Room EV 10.625 to read and discuss the following texts:
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Joni Adamson is President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and Distinguished Global Futures Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL). She is Founding Director of the Flagship Hub of UNESCO BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition, the first humanities-led science platform in the world. She is also Director of Humanities for the Environment North America (HFE), based in the Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation at ASU’s Walton Center for Planetary Heath.
Adamson is the author and/or co-editor of nine books and special issues and 90 articles, chapters, reviews and blog posts which have been widely cited, reprinted, and translated into Mandarin and Spanish. She writes on environmental justice, the centrality of the environmental humanities to the sustainability sciences, Indigenous literatures and scientific literacies, the rights of nature movement, and the food justice movement. Her research has been supported by many awards and grants, including the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She has delivered 90+ keynote and plenary lectures throughout the US and in Australia, China, England, Italy, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan.
🗓: March 28, 2025 |2-4 PM
📍: Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705
This event is supported by the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, the Speculative Life Research Cluster, the Department of English at Concordia University, the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University, and the CISSC.
