Headline: Cli‐Fi: The Dystopian Impulse of Contemporary Climate Fiction

This workshop on climate fiction is a cooperation between the M.A. seminars “Dystopian Visions of America” (Kathleen Loock) and “American Ecologies” (Alexander Starre) at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam.

Since the new millennium, a growing canon of dystopian literature and film centers around climate change, natural disasters, and environmental catastrophes. These texts have been labeled “climate change fiction,” “climate fiction,” or short “cli-fi.” Notable examples of North American cli-fi are the novels of Barbara Kingsolver, Paolo Bacigalupi, Margaret Atwood, Nathaniel Rich and others, as well as Hollywood films such as The Day after Tomorrow, Interstellar, and Mad Max: Fury Road. The aim of this workshop is to critically engage with the aesthetics and the cultural work of cli-fi.

Invited Guests

Julia Leyda is an American Studies scholar based at the IASS, where she is working on a project on cli-fi following her research on media representations of extreme weather, most recently in her co-edited collection Extreme Weather and Global Media (Routledge, 2015).

Thiago Pinto Barbosa is an anthropologist at the IASS, where he researches environmental awareness and coordinates projects of dialogue between science and arts.

For more Information please visit: www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/faculty/culture/research/events/cli-fi2016/index.html