Languages of the Anthropocene

Annual Multidisciplinary Conference Series: Established in 2023

"Parrhesia", Campidoglio, Rome, Italy, September 2011

Kreider + O’Leary, “Parrhesia”, Campidoglio, Rome, Italy, September 2011

The environmental crisis is a planetary problem but the ways in which the climate catastrophe is experienced and spoken and written about are far from universal. Environmental slow violence unfolds globally but unevenly across self-perceived centres and peripheries of political, economic, and cultural power. It cements and exacerbates century-old patterns of colonial violence. The language of the Anthropocene foregrounds universality, in ways that risk to marginalise or silence the world’s most vulnerable communities. 

How can we strive for a plurality of languages that articulates these tensions and apparent contradictions, and that aspires to transcend them? What are the most salient differences, across dominant and minority languages, including the languages of indigenous people? How is the global environmental catastrophe differently conceptualised in policy and science, on the one hand, and everyday life, on the other?

Established in 2023, this annual conference offers a comparative analysis and collective re-thinking of the role of language(s) in personal, communal, transnational and planetary engagement with environmental catastrophe. We focus on four interrelated sets of questions: 

  • How can the expertise of scholars of literature, language, and culture be engaged to advance our understanding of cultural and linguistic difference in climate discourse? 
  • How can researchers help foster multilingual communities that query Anthropocene discourse from diverse angles, including the position of its least privileged and most vulnerable designations? 
  • What is the relation between human multilingualism and more-than-human communities, temporalities, and intersections? Can multilingualism guide us towards imaginative frameworks that resist anthropocentric mastery? 
  • Can we read the Anthropocene as a grammar or language that is shaped by particular quotidian orderings of world-ending and world-building forces (e.g. time, movement, affect, space)?

Programme

2024 Symposium

Day 1: Tuesday, 18th June 2024

Location: Sala Ignazio Ambrogio | Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature Culture Straniere
Università degli Studi Roma Tre | Via del Valco di San Paolo 19 |00142 Rome

11:20
WELCOME
11:30
INTRODUCTIONs

Florian Mussgnug (University College London)

11:45
OPENING KEYNOTE

Anais Maurer (Rutgers University | CAPAS)
Fighting Nuclear Colonialism and Climate Imperialism from the Empire’s Edge

12:45Lunch
14:15
AGAINST CLIMATE COLONIALITY

Chair: Lucia Esposito (Roma Tre University)

Cydney Phillip (University College London)
Liquid Plantationocene: Narratives of Water from the U.S. Gulf Coast

Eleonora Rossi (Birkbeck University London)
 Flows of Change: Resistance in Contemporary Indigenous Australian Fiction

15:45Coffee
16:15
INHABITATION, ENTANGLEMENT, LANDSCAPE

Chair: Luca Marcozzi (Roma Tre University)

Felicitas Loest (Heidelberg University | CAPAS)
Troubling Coloniality: the Sublime and Haunting in Mexican Landscape Poetry

Silvia Vittonatto (University College London)
Uomini e sterpi: Ecological Precarity and Plant-Human Entwinements

17:45
CLOSING REMARKS (DAY ONE)
18:45
THE LANGUAGES OF WATER

“Moby Dick”, Via Edgardo Ferrati, 3a, 00154 Roma (TBC)

Concept concert with Juliano Abramovay (fretless guitar), Chrysanthi Gkika (lyra), Stefano Nencha (guitar), Stefano Nunzi (bass), Alessandro Luccioli (percussion), Maddalena Pennacchia (voice).

DAY 2: Wednesday, 19th June 2024

Location: Sainsbury Lecture Theatre | British School at Rome | Via Antonio Gramsci 61 | 00197 Rome

09:00Welcome
09:10
VOICES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Chair: Courtney Quaintance (British School at Rome)

Michael Dunn (Heidelberg University | CAPAS)
Singing Through the Slothocene: The Voice(s) of Apocalyptic Prophecy

Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University) 
and Juliano Abramovay (Durham University |Codarts University for the Arts)
Human Landscapes, Transcreation, and Music

10:30Coffee
10:50
CREATIVE-CRITICAL INTERVENTION

Caitríona Ní Dhúill (University of Salzburg)
Andiamo / Let’s Get Out of Here: Kinetic Thinking and Radical Relocalisation

11:30
NARRATIVES OF DIVERSITY AND DISSENT

Chair: Caterina Romeo (Sapienza University of Rome)

Robert Folger (Heidelberg University |CAPAS)
Cannibals: Indigenous Apocalypse and Colonialism

Simona Corso (Roma Tre University)
Decolonial Indignation: Voices from the Caribbean 

13:00Lunch
14:00
SPECULATIVE TEMPORALITIES

Chair: Emilia Di Rocco (Sapienza University of Rome)

Gero Bauer (University of Tübingen)
Facing the Present: Narrative and Critical Moods in Times of Crisis

Giulia Magro (Sapienza University of Rome)
Future (Im)Perfect: Ecomedievalist Temporalities in Science Fiction

Abigail Bleach (University College London)
Out of Time: Nuclear Semiotics and the Medieval(ish) Anthropocene

15:45Coffee
16:15
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES 

Chair: Giuseppe Episcopo (Roma Tre University)

Birgit Neumann (Düsseldorf University)
“Neatly Dismantled” Infrastructures in Speculative Fiction: 
The Pharmakon of the Anthropocene 

Rhys Williams (University of Glasgow)
Feeling Our Way Through: Imaginaries, Communities, and Infrastructures of Energy                                                

17:45Break
18:00
PUBLIC KEYNOTE

Chair: Simona Corso

Shaul Bassi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Othello in the Anthropocene

19:30Drinks
20:00Conference dinner
 

Day 3: Thursday, 20th June 2024

Location: Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali | Sapienza Università di Roma | Edificio Marco Polo | Viale dello Scalo San Lorenzo 82 | 00159 Rome

9:00
WELCOME
9:15
CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE (POST)MODERNIST ANTHROPOCENE  

Chair: Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza University of Rome)
    
Florian Mussgnug (University College London | Roma Tre)
Unlearning the End of History: from Postmodernism to Early Anthropocene

Asia Battiloro (Sapienza University of Rome)
Ec[h]ologies of Modernism in Amy Sackville’s Polar Novel The Still Point

Adam Stock (York St John University |CAPAS)
Colonial Cartographies and Apocalyptic Imaginaries: Deserts at the End of the World

11:15Lunch
11:45
GENRES OF THE (POST)MODERNIST ANTHROPOCENE

Chair: Ali Deharidad (Sapienza University Rome)

Rosanne Gallenne (University College Dublin)
Sheila Wingfield’s Ecopoetry: Preserving Class or Preserving Nature?

Annamaria Elia (Sapienza University of Rome)
Voices from the Elsewhere: Surrealism and Posthumanism in Antoine Volodine 

Daniel Finch-Race (University of Bologna)
Postmodern Currents in Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann’s How Does the World End (for Others)?

13:30Conclusions and lunch

Day 3: Thursday, 20th June 2024

9:00
WELCOME
9:15
CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE (POST)MODERNIST ANTHROPOCENE  

Chair: Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza University of Rome)
    
Florian Mussgnug (University College London | Roma Tre)
Unlearning the End of History: from Postmodernism to Early Anthropocene

Asia Battiloro (Sapienza University of Rome)
Ec[h]ologies of Modernism in Amy Sackville’s Polar Novel The Still Point

Adam Stock (York St John University |CAPAS)
Colonial Cartographies and Apocalyptic Imaginaries: Deserts at the End of the World

11:15Lunch
11:45
GENRES OF THE (POST)MODERNIST ANTHROPOCENE

Chair: Ali Deharidad (Sapienza University Rome)

Rosanne Gallenne (University College Dublin)
Sheila Wingfield’s Ecopoetry: Preserving Class or Preserving Nature?

Annamaria Elia (Sapienza University of Rome)
Voices from the Elsewhere: Surrealism and Posthumanism in Antoine Volodine 

Daniel Finch-Race (University of Bologna)
Postmodern Currents in Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann’s How Does the World End (for Others)?

13:30Conclusions and lunch

2023 Symposium

Day 1: Tuesday, 20th June 

14:00
INTRODUCTION

Florian Mussgnug (University College London)

Abigail Brundin (British School at Rome)

14:10
OPENING KEYNOTE

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus University)
Decentering and Transgressing: Two Modes of Posthumanist Orientation

Chair: Monika Kaup (University of Washington)

15:10
PANEL 1: ORIENTATIONS

Chair: Camilla Miglio (Sapienza University Rome)

Lara Choksey (University College London)
Signs of the Anthropocene: a vague poetics

Michael Dunn (Heidelberg University)
Pandora’s Music Box: Opening up the Apocalyptic Anthropocene

16:30Coffee break
17:15
PANEL 2: ASSEMBLAGES

Chair: Luca Marcozzi (Roma Tre University)

Lydia Gibson (Columbia University)
(data) Clouds in Untainted Skies above Brave New Worlds

Daniel Finch-Race (University of Bologna)
Time for Trashscapes

18:45
CLOSING REMARKS (DAY ONE)

Emilano Guaraldo (Ca’ Foscari University Venice)
Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza University Rome)     

 

DAY 2: Wednesday, 21 June 2023

09:00
PANEL 3: ECOLOGIES

Chair: Anne Brüske (Regensburg University)

Tommy Lynch (Chichester University)
Undoing the Anthro of the Anthropocene

Flurina Gradin (Zurich University of the Arts and St Gallen University)
Biotope Topologies: Sensing Unruly Natures and Hybrid Ecologies

Pieter Vermeulen (KU Leuven)
Talking Trees: Plant Communication and Other Fictions of Spontaneous Order

11.00Coffee Break
11:30
PANEL 4: NARRATIVES

Chair: Manfredi Merluzzi (Roma Tre University)

Giada Peterle (University of Padova)
Graphic Narrative and the Multiscalar Geographies of “Home” 

Robert Folger (Heidelberg University)
Anthropocenic Monolingualism? Epistemological Challenges

13:00Lunch Break
14:00
PANEL 5: GENRES

Chair: Anne Schwan (Edinburgh Napier University)

Florian Mussgnug (University College London)
Reading Climate Fiction as World Literature

Silvia Vittonatto (University College London)
Resistant Grief and Futurity in the Contemporary Climate Change Memoir

Jenny Stümer (Heidelberg University)
Feels like an Impasse: The Anthropocene as Apocalyptic Genre

16:00Coffee
16:30
VIRTUAL KEYNOTE

Ursula K. Heise (University of California, Los Angeles)
Anthropocene Multiverse

Chair: Pieter Vermeulen (KU Leuven)

17:30Break
18:00
PUBLIC KEYNOTE

Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick)
Gramsci’s Anthropocene; or, Planning for the Post-Apocalypse

Chair: Florian Mussgnug

 

 

Organising Committee

  • Florian Mussgnug (University College London) - chair
  • Lara Choksey (University College London)
  • Simona Corso (Roma Tre University) 
  • Michael Dunn (Heidelberg University)
  • Daniel Finch Race (Bologna University)
  • Luca Marcozzi (Roma Tre University)
  • Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza University Rome)
  • Jenny Stümer (Heidelberg University)
  • Silvia Vittonatto (University College London)

Partner Organisations

  • The British School at Rome 
  • University College London: Cities Partnerships Programme (CPP) and UCL Anthropocene
  • Heidelberg Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS)
  • Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Sapienza University Rome
  • Department of Humanities, Roma Tre University, Rome

 

    UCL CPP logo

    bsr logo

    Roma Tre logo

    capas logo

    heidelberg logo

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