Seed Keeping as language growing: land, language and indigenous representation in pop culture

Comparative World Literature 59th Annual Conference: co-sponsored by American Indian Studies, The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies, History, English, Journalism and Public Relations, Environmental Science and Policy, and RGRLL.

 

Ecocriticism and Popular Culture: Cool Trends in a Warming Climate

Comp Lit Event Flyer

Jaws made us terrified of the ocean. Star Trek made us dream of space exploration and a post-scarcity world. The shows we watch and the video games we play portray a variety of apocalypses while some deny the science of climate change. At the same time, social media encourages rampant consumerism even as #deinfluencing (a movement arguing against consumerism) trends on TikTok.

Popular culture—broadly conceived as the widely-accessible literature, films, television shows, video games, music, visual arts, and discourse on social media platforms that we spend so much time “consuming”—has long had a tricky relationship with the environment, sustainability, and climate change.

This conference will explore the relationship between pop culture and the environment. We welcome pessimistic and optimistic interpretations of the topic: thinking ecologically can open up possibilities of true social change, but ecocritical readings of texts may also reveal precisely how much change is needed. Given the prevalence of popular culture in our current cultural environment, this is a encompassing topic, and we encourage cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.

Below is a diverse list of possible paper or panel topics. In the spirit of Comparative Literature, activist scholarship, and the global importance of this topic, please consider these ideas as a sample rather than a limit:

  • Ecocritical readings of pop-culture and mass-culture texts (written, digital, visual, musical).
  • Historical, comparative, cross-genre, or cross-medium explorations of themes of the apocalypse and/or eucatastrophe, utopias and dystopias, colonialism and anticolonialism, etc.
  • Explorations of material culture (and the discourse thereon) in a globalized world, including, for example, fast vs. slow fashion, planned obsolescence, commodity fetishism’s relationship to collectibles and “merch” like Funkos and maker communities.
  • The relationship of social media to sustainability, consumption, and climate change.
  • Trends in journalistic and political treatments of climate change.
  • The pedagogy of environmentalism: its prevalence within a course, the role of texts that have an overt message about environmental care, universities as sites of innovation, etc.
  • The relationship between humans and animals: in literature, in film, in reality
  • Green Eggs and …? Green themes in children’s literature
  • The treatment of ecological crisis in graphic narratives
  • Intersections between notions of “the environment” and identity, and the construction of that relationship through various modes: language, religion, art, etc.

 

Keynote Speaker: 

For this year's conference we would like to welcome Kaniehtiio Horn. She is a Mohawk Canadian actress, director, and activist most known for her roles as Tanis on Letterkenny and The Deer Lady on Reservation Dogs. She was a panelist on Canada Reads in 2020, where she defended indigenous Canadian author Eden Robinson’s novel Son of a Trickster. Her directorial debut is the film Seeds (showing at the Toronto Film Festival 2024), a horror / comedy about protecting heirloom seeds. Horn’s work explores the intersection of Indigenous spaces and storytelling, focusing particularly on environmental issues. Her talk will be on Thursday, April 24, 2025, at 2 pm in the Anatol Center: “Seed keeping as language growing: land, language, and indigenous representation in pop culture.”