Survivors of armed conflicts and environmental disasters alike experience an imperative to document the damages visited upon their communities through testimonial literature, visual culture, and other modes of creative expression. Their voices bear witness to the discrepant impacts of human and environmental violence on populations marginalized by histories of colonization, racialization, migration, and geographic division, asserting their right to narrate their own histories. Meanwhile, dominant media portrayals often downplay the agency of survivors, perpetuating collective amnesia about their perspectives.

This seminar focuses on the intersection of ecocatastrophe and warfare to examine how survivors of disaster document its unequal consequences for human and more-than-human life. How have writers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, scholars, and activists mobilized their tools of expression to record the sometimes spectacular, sometimes invisible effects of environmental violence and armed conflict? Which elements do they tend to privilege, and which are subject to erasure? What are the ethics of documenting populations and environments reeling from catastrophe, those in the process of damage, or those to be harmed in the future? How can we represent damage without insisting upon recovery, and how might documentation, broadly understood, facilitate the work of mourning?

We invite submissions analyzing the capacities and limitations of creative media (literature, visual arts, theory, film, etc.) to document the past, present, and future of human and environmental violence.