In association with the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI)
University of Cologne
July 11–12, 2025 | Save the date!
There is growing evidence that the cumulative impacts of industrial societies on several vital Earth systems are reaching or have passed critical thresholds. Contemporary societies have barely begun to confront the potentially catastrophic impacts of escalating extinctions, toxic pollutants, and growing climate disruption in the medium to long-term. Moreover, environmental changes are already contributing to a range of local/regional disasters, including food and water shortages, the spread of disease vectors, and the increasing frequency and intensity of weather-borne extremes (e.g. storms, flooding, heat waves and wildfires). Whilst such disasters are generally cast as singular events, they arise from longer-standing patterns of interrelationship among culture, society, technology and environment. They also have long-term consequences. How people prepare for, respond to, and recover from such calamities depends on their assumptions about their environment, the stories they tell about it, and their historically conditioned modes of perceiving and interacting with more-than-human others. Disaster preparedness therefore has a sociocultural dimension, no less than a techno-scientific one, entailing fundamental questions of value, meaning and identity, as well as issues of social cohesion, cooperation and wellbeing.
This symposium takes storytelling as a site for the exploration, enactment, and unsettling of entangled human and nonhuman lives in the horizon of rapid environmental change. Our particular focus is the complexity and stakes of narrating multispecies and intergenerational histories and futures, spaces of (unevenly) shared living and dying, in a time of escalating extinctions, ecological unravelling and climatic disruption. How might paying attention to the ways in which other species experience and craft their worlds open up new possibilities for co-existence in catastrophic times? And what kinds of future imaginaries and educational practices might be conducive to enhanced disaster preparedness, risk reduction and transformational resilience? Bringing together perspectives and approaches from across the environmental humanities and social sciences, we examine the forces, commitments, and assumptions that shape such stories; the institutions and regimes of knowledge and expertise that underlie them; the media and genres through which such stories are told and circulated; the ideologies that articulate themselves through these accounts and their silences; as well as the responsibilities and limitation of telling others’ stories, human and not.
Keynote Speakers
Thom van Dooren (Humboldt Research Prize Fellow of MESH, Dep. Dir., Syney Environment Institute, Professor of Environmental Humanities in School of Humanities, University of Sydney)
Alexa Weik von Mossner (Associated Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Freiburg)