• Displacement: uprooting, survival and perspectives, Matias Barberis Rami
• Cannibalizing Utopia: Suzanne Césaire’s Ecofeminist critique of Colonial Discourse of the Tropics, Emily Eyestone

Panel description

This panel aims to strengthen a dialogue between utopia/dystopia as a literary genre and disaster studies by discussing post-apocalyptic narratives while addressing climate change, disasters, resilience and displacement.

Post-apocalyptic utopias and dystopias show humans in constant evolution, coping with the end of the world, in extreme environments where it is essential to survive. Likewise, the social sciences have developed post-traditional and post-rational thinking, relating risks and disasters to societies in which every actor brings a different perspective. Radical reconfigurations of social, political, cultural and environmental factors are presented in an attempt to govern the complexity of human beings.

Understanding a disaster requires a comprehensive analysis of the historic, symbolic, affective, and sometimes religious background that characterizes the relationship between a community and its surroundings. In this sense, the notions of imaginaries, local narratives and memories play an essential role in understanding catastrophic scenarios.

For this panel, we invite papers that focus on interdisciplinary debates with a clear linkage to post-apocalyptic literature, including but not limited to approaches on climate change adaptation, socio-environmental risks, resilience, displacement, solidarity, social change and ethics in disasters. Moreover, we strongly encourage contributors to intersect theoretical frameworks and empirical scenarios, including insights into literature and contemporary debates on disasters.