During the Q&A for her talk on futures thinking and building a cosmovisionary archive, Joni Adamson received a question from the audience about how to handle the “tremendous pessimism” of young people today.  

Adamson, the President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English at Arizona State University, replied that she leans into creative thinking, asking people to imagine their version of a world that works. What could that look like?  

Adamson’s talk was one of five that formed the 2025 Speculative Life speaker series at Concordia, a lecture series exploring questions about future ecologies while emphasizing the systems of exploitation and oppression that have led to climate crisis and disaster.  

In a time of tremendous pessimism, talks like Adamson’s provide frameworks for continuing to engage with the possibilities of collectively-oriented life on Earth — in part by bringing people together in a physical space and expanding the horizons of Milieux’s community.  

The 2025 Speculative Life speaker series was led by Dr. Jill Didur, Co-Director of the cluster, and Brennan McCracken, PhD student and co-coordinator of the Critical Anthropocene Research Group.  

The series also featured ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats) Research Professor Marco Armiero on toxic narrative infrastructure; environmental engineer and political philosopher Malcom Ferdinand on his new book Loving Ourselves the Earth: Undoing the Colonial Inhabitation; and the University of Bristol’s Alison Donnell. Donnell presented twice, first on missing Caribbean women narratives in Montreal and then on building impact in public humanities. 

In an interview, McCracken suggests that the thread linking these talks is a shared interest in discourses of environment and sustainability as understood through or alongside colonialism and critical race theory. 

Adamson’s talk, for example, emphasized moving beyond definitions of climate fiction — literature that addresses climate change — which exclude Indigenous literature. 

Indigenous-authored fiction is often characterized as historical narrative, rather than climate fiction, despite telling critical and creative stories about climate events and ecosystems. Just because a work is set in the past, Adamson suggested, doesn’t mean it’s not speculative.  

Working with Walidah Imarisha’s concept of visionary fiction, Adamson analyzed Linda Hogan’s 1995 novel Solar Storms, a coming-of-age story about a community organizing against hydro dam development, fictionalizing the real-world resistance to Canada’s James Bay Project. The novel, Adamson argued, should be considered part of a cosmo-visionary archive — narratives and texts that understand Earth systems and cycles as having rights “to regenerate biocapacity and continue vital cycles,” as written in the Indigenous-authored Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.  

Adamson advocated for what she calls “cosmos thinking,” a reworking of the popular environmental humanities term “futures thinking” to incorporate Indigenous epistemologies.  

Imagining a world that works requires understanding the world that has always been here. What if we thought about our future in ways that work with nature instead of against it, Adamson asked. Can we stay warm, for example, without affecting ocean circulation?  

Like Adamson, CNRS researcher Malcom Ferdinand emphasized that there can be no vision of the future without understanding how colonialism structures the present. His new book, Loving Ourselves the Earth, tells the story of the pesticide contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe.  

Ferdinand’s presentation, like his book, engaged in shifting the narrative around this scandal. Speaking to a packed room made up of students, faculty, and community members, Ferdinand delineated that a technician’s narrative of the chlordecone contamination in Martinique — a pesticide that has made it unsafe to fish or produce root vegetables, appearing in the blood and breast milk of citizens — naturalizes the social order. Technocrats blame the chemical compound itself, rather than the colonial regime which used the pesticide for banana production, exploiting the land.  

In telling the story of the contamination, then, Ferdinand was reframing how that story is told, addressing the problematic whiteness in research and sciences which leads to narratives that obscure colonial responsibility and just solutions.  

Ferdinand closed with a question: “how to love a land that is contaminated?” Like Adamson, he stressed relationships to land and ecology that are oriented around care and reciprocity, rather than extracting resources towards colonial prosperity.  

McCracken mentions that both Ferdinand and Donnell’s talks brought in attendees from outside Concordia. Geography MA Tatiana Haustant had organized a separate event with Ferdinand off-campus for members of the Caribbean diaspora to connect with him and learn about his work. When that event sold-out, she re-directed the extra interest towards his Concordia talk.  

For McCracken, that was one of the biggest strengths of the Spec Life speaker series — bringing together people across disciplines and communities, expanding beyond Spec Life’s membership. Questions about how to conceptualize the future or how to love a toxic land stretch far beyond any university lab. 

“The conversations that happen after the events as people are still mulling around or going to the pub afterwards or reminding each other about upcoming events — those sorts of connections, I think, are so, so valuable,” he says. 

“They help me get out of my disciplinary bubble in English. They help me find a sense of community and connection in what can otherwise be sort of isolating, solitary work.” 

As an inherently interdisciplinary institute, Milieux is especially geared towards popping the disciplinary bubble. But while it’s always been a hub for fine arts and communications members, the institute hasn’t always been a natural draw for literature students. Milieux’s projects are often geared towards making and creating rather than close reading. 

McCracken says this series has helped bridge the space between his literary studies and other departments.  

“It really helps me in my own work because I see how the sorts of questions and problems that I spend my time thinking and writing about in an English department are not just interesting to folks in other disciplines and other departments, but are often also shared.”  

“I find that it strengthens my work and it strengthens that sense of the community as well,” he adds. 

Before each talk, Spec Life also hosted reading groups dedicated to studying and discussing the upcoming speaker’s work. Those groups provided an informal space for students and faculty to chat and engage in texts together outside the classroom setting.  

“It’s genuinely so interesting, and to be honest, also just really fun to have a space like that,” McCracken says. “To have three or four faculty members from three or four different departments, all contributing to the same conversation alongside graduate students — it felt like a really generative and just engaging way to learn more about this work.” 

Ahead of Ferdinand’s talk, the group read chapters from his previous book Decolonial Ecology, a major work in the field. McCracken found those chapters helped explain pieces of his own dissertation, which looks at experimental Canadian novels and features several First Nations writers.  

“Ferdinand writes about what he calls the double fracture of modernity, which is on the one hand, the fracture of environmental harm, the fracture of human induced climate change,” McCracken explains. “And then on the other hand, [the] fracture of colonialism and the colonial project that violently dispossessed Indigenous people from their land and exists in various ongoing forms in settler colonial states, such as Canada.”  

Ferdinand calls for thinking these two fractures together, arguing that one cannot be understood or studied without the other. 

“That was very helpful and really precisely, and also very efficiently and quickly, identifying something that is at issue in what I study,” McCracken says. “I specifically study literature, but it’s this relationship between ecology and colonialism as it’s mediated through literature, through novels in particular, that interests me the most.”  

From cosmovisionary archives to refusing the technocratic story of pesticides, both Ferdinand and Adamson’s talks sought to shift the narrative on how we think or talk about ecology and colonialism. That’s the key link between literature and the future-oriented projects which proliferate at Milieux: narratives shape the futures that come to be.  

“All these fundamental questions that interest the various people who are associated with Spec Life are mediated often — not always — but mediated often through language and specifically through narrative,” McCracken adds.  

The 2025 Spec Life speaker series put the spotlight on narrative at the same time as it invited participants across disciplines to bring their own perspectives.  

Together, the reading groups and talks provided an opportunity for community members to participate in rethinking how we tell the story of a world marked by crisis and care. 

– Rosie Long Decter, Milieux Storyteller