Project description
Investigating how transpacific literature represents climate emergency
Disaster distortion is a term used to describe the phenomenon where natural disasters overshadow other forms of violence related to human activity and climate change. These forms of violence have a systemic impact over an extended period and often disproportionately affect marginalised communities. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the DISASTERDISTORTION project will investigate how contemporary fiction distorts our perception of the climate emergency. It will focus on disaster dystopias that distance us from personal and environmental responsibility. The project will analyse the use of the disaster trope in fiction from Australia, Japan, and Mexico, examining up to 12 contemporary novels and short story anthologies. It will use an interdisciplinary methodology combining close reading and qualitative data analysis to understand how we conceptualise the climate emergency.
Objective
I explore how the representation of disasters in contemporary fiction warps our understanding of the threat posed by the climate emergency. To do so, I coin the term disaster distortion. Disaster distortion refers to how catastrophes monopolize the imagination when representing the consequences of climate alterations in ways that restrain or omit other forms of violence associated with human involvement and which are systemic, stretch over longer periods of time, and affect the most disenfranchised. I focus on two ways for fictional disasters to produce this distortion: first, disaster dystopias promotes the idea that the climate emergency is a hypothetical concern and not a pressing issue; second, disasters estranges and alienates human agency and responsibility and exclude acts of interpersonal or environmental care.
In this project, I propose to study the challenges of climate crisis representation by fashioning an exercise of comparative literature that explores the deployment of the trope of disasters in fiction produced across the Pacific from the second decade of the twenty-first century onward. I choose to focus on three literary hubs distributed across this space: Japan, Australia, and Mexico. I will select a corpus of up to 12 contemporary novels or anthologies of short stories, 4 for each of the literary ecosystems. The texts will be first analyzed using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines close-reading with qualitative data analysis to examine the mechanisms through which we are imagining the climate emergency.
My goals are to devise a theoretical framework that can question the usefulness of the trope of disasters, assess to what extent climate dystopias are rising to the challenge of representing the climate crisis effectively, examine whether representations of interpersonal and environmental care foster a sense of agency and responsibility, and implement a functional methodological model of multipolar transpacific comparative literature.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01
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9000 Gent
Belgium
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