OSL Seminar: ‘Eco-Collapse in Transatlantic Perspective’

Nijmegen, Radboud University | 5 October, 19 October, 9 November, 23 November and 7 December 2022 (13:00-15:00, Erasmusplein 1, room E2.21) + 21 December 2022 (13:00-16:00, Erasmusplein 1, room E2.06)

Organizer: Prof. Michael Boyden (Radboud University)
Open to: PhDs and RMA students; OSL members have first access.
Credits: 5 ECs. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Registration will open on August 31st, 2022

Disasters – whether or not man-made – often catalyze the emergence of a sense of national self-consciousness. In the Netherlands, for instance, ingenuity and resilience in the face of successive floods constitute central ingredients of the Batavian myth around which a Dutch national imaginary took shape. But the Batavian myth also displays remarkable parallels with other narratives of historical self-legitimation, particularly those of settler or pioneer cultures in the United States and elsewhere.

In reconfigured form, such localized tropes of national self-fashioning now resurface in speculative and science fiction about planetary collapse as well as Indigenous counter-epistemologies. An understanding of the cultural work that such eco-collapse narratives do, and how they reverberate and are recycled, is an essential step toward meeting the challenges of a warming planet today.

This course specifically considers how stories that depict the impact of eco-disasters on the identity and mentalities of a given group of people take shape in relation to similar narratives circulating elsewhere. Mobilizing critical insights from recent scholarship in ecocriticism and Anthropocene Studies, we will explore such multidirectional borrowings in selected examples of eco-collapse narratives and other cultural expressions.

The full programme and course slides are available here.