Date: 30 November 2022
Venue: University of Ferrara (hybrid)
Green Utopia Now! is a joint project with the KaleidoScope of Sustainability that will inaugurate the fourth Kick-Off Symposium of the PhD in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing (29 November-3 December 2022), an innovative, interdisciplinary, and international doctoral program at the University of Ferrara.
For the Green Utopia Now! A Transdisciplinary Symposium on How to Deal with the Climate Crisis we are bringing together an outstanding group of early career researchers (ECRs) working on climate and the environment from a variety of fields of study and disciplinary backgrounds. The symposium will provide a creative space where ECRs can share their transdisciplinary perspectives on how to challenge the limits of conventional monodisciplinary views on sustainability, and how the hard sciences and the humanities can join forces to tackle the current climate crisis. Each of these scientific and cultural points of view will be brought together by a utopian impulse that insists on the role of collaboration, and the urgency of positive climate action.
Green utopianism, as Heather Alberro points out, shares with political ecological movements a radical and urgent “need to live and embody better alternatives within the Now.” Furthermore, empirical ecocriticism contributes to these efforts, such as in W. P. Malecki’s work, by combining psychological research with insights from animal studies and ecocriticism to assess the psychological impact of human/non-human relationships delivered by utopian Climate Fiction (CF).
This symposium’s ethos is guided by our convictions about the importance of (1) transdisciplinary collaboration, (2) centering the research being conducted by ECRs as invaluable to innovation and change, and (3) utopian thinking and practice for engaging with the biggest problems facing our contemporary world.
Green Utopia Now! hopes to be able to close the University of Helsinki Environmental Humanities Hub’s Environmental Humanities Month with a contribution on how to deal with the climate crisis that is transdisciplinary, action-oriented, and present-centered.
In Partnership with:
KaleidoScope of Sustainability Annual Symposium, 29 November-3 December 2022 (D. in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing)
Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS)
Routes towards Sustainability: International University Network
Featured in:
University of Helsinki Environmental Humanities Hub’s Environmental Humanities Month 2022
