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Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination

Project description

Studying cultural representation of environmental violence

The destruction of nature raises questions about responsibility and accountability. Who should we hold accountable for the loss of both human and non-human victims? Our culture plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges posed by ecocide and extinction. The ERC-funded EcoViolence project suggests that writers, artists, and filmmakers can adapt existing techniques to respond to environmental challenges, revealing the connections between crimes against humanity and nature. The project aims to study the cultural representation of environmental violence and develop an ecological model for its study. It will document how various forms of art represent environmental violence and analyse how these representations reflect on guilt, responsibility, and the implication of culture in the violence it depicts.

Objective

The ongoing destruction of the natural world raises critical questions about responsibility. How do we remember the victims, both human and non-human? And who is to blame? Contemporary culture plays a crucial role in addressing these questions. Large-scale processes like ecocide and extinction pose significant conceptual and representational challenges. This project posits that writers, artists and filmmakers are responding to these challenges by adapting existing repertoires, especially ones that emerged in response to the Holocaust, slavery, and other atrocities. In so doing they reveal the historical, structural and discursive links between crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.

EcoViolence will be the first comprehensive, transnational, comparative study of the cultural imaginary of environmental violence. Bringing together recent work in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism, we will develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence and its representation. We will document how texts, films, art works, plays and exhibitions represent ecoviolence; map how they link it to colonialism and genocide; and analyse how they reflect on questions of guilt and responsibility, as well as culture’s own implication in the violence it depicts. Furthermore, we will explore how these representations harness affect and emotion to help people relate to the environmental crisis and promote critical self-reflection.

EcoViolence will effect a major reorientation in cultural memory research and ecocriticism by providing a framework to think about violence and memory in more-than-human terms. The project will result in a “best practices” guide to engage cultural representations in pedagogy to enhance critical literacies about ecoviolence and move beyond simplistic stories where everyone is either a victim or a perpetrator that have stifled full responses to our collective ecocidal trajectories.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 000 000,00
Address
HEIDELBERGLAAN 8
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 000 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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