Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown

Heather Alberro is a Senior Lecturer in global sustainable development at Nottingham Trent University, in the Department of History, Heritage and Global Cultures. She also serves as co-convenor for the Political Studies Association's (PSA) environmental politics specialist group, and as a member of the PSA's Executive Committee. Emrah Atasoy, an Associate Professor of English, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), working in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Nora Castle is currently an independent scholar. She received her PhD in 2023 from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she also completed an Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study. Rhiannon Firth is a Lecturer in Sociology of Education at IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She co-leads the MA modules Sociology of Education and Gender, Sexuality and Education, and is Programme Leader for the MA Sociology of Education. Conrad Scott holds a PhD from and is an Associate Lecturer in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands, and is an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s Honours English course on “The Ecological Imagination,” where he holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Part 1: Monsters and Monstrosity 1. “In the woods the Tox is still wild”: The EcoGothic in Rory Power’s Wilder Girls 2. The Human/Un(human): Monster, Ecophobia, and the Posthuman Horror(scape) in Dibakar Banerjee’s “Monster,” Ghost Stories 3. A Scourge Even Worse Than Disease: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as Pandemic Political Allegory Part 2: Intersectional Critique 4. Fungal Imaginaries: The Reconfiguration of Post-Pandemic Society in Severance (2018) and The Last of Us (2023) 5. Five Hundred Years of Plague: Indigenous Apocalypse in Joca Reiners Terron’s Death and the Meteor (2019) 6. Corruption and Cleansing: An Eco-Feminist Approach to the Nature/Culture Dichotomy in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted 7. Through Currents of Contamination: The Failure of Immunizing Insularity in Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure Part 3: More-Than-Human Mutual Aid and Eco-Justice 8. Dystopian Prohibitions and Utopian Possibilities in Edmonton, Canada, at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic 9. Affiliation as Environmental Justice in Three Climate Novels 10. “A Vortex of Summons and Repulsion”: The Productive Abject, Posthumanisms, and the Weird in Charles Burns’ Black Hole (2005) 11. (Un)Caring Borders: More-than-Human Solidarities in the Białowieża Forest Part 4: Creative Resistance and Utopian Glimmers 12. “Preservation is an Action, not a State”: DIY Utopian Enclaves and Ways Out of Post-Pandemic Surveillance Capitalism in Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day 13. Pandemic Dramaturgy: Co-Designing the Performance Dying Together/Futures with the COVID-19 Virus 14. Vitality of Non-Human Entities: Plagues and Pandemics as Hyperobjects in Defoe, Camus, and Pamuk 15. World-Building Enactments of The School Strike Movements During the Pandemic: Reading Youth Climate Crisis Movements Through a Micro and Nano-Utopian Lens