Emergency is commonly perceived as a state of volatility that forces urgent and time-sensitive actions, such as earthquakes, military coups, famines, or pandemics that disrupt normal life. At the same time, emergency can be expanded over a larger time scale not tied to a specific event. Specifically, the climate crisis resists common conceptions of emergency as it is placed on a spatiotemporal scale withdrawn from human experientiality (see Timothy Morton 2013). The climate crisis, in contrast to local emergencies, calls for a shift in focus from the human to the nonhuman. It demands reconceptualisations of emergency, making care, justice, and agency in the context of human-nonhuman entanglement more complex while simultaneously asking for alternative forms of change and futures.

Our seminar is concerned with notions of emergency, emphasizing negotiations of human-nonhuman interaction through narrative, textualities, or cultural practices. Tying in current scholarship on anthropocentric thinking, we explore how representation, performance, or legislation can prompt us to explore alternative responses to emergency in a world where the human is not separate from but inherently enmeshed in it (see Marco Caracciolo 2021). We investigate how agency can be exercised in the crisis not only from a human but also nonhuman perspective and alternative modes of being in the world imagined, rethinking views on interspecies care, overcoming extractivism, and geological movements.

We ask how the notion of emergency in different forms – fiction or nonfiction – provides the opportunity to deconstruct the concepts of anthropocentric time. We argue that emergency prompts us to reimagine and explore futures and concepts of temporality such as ecological time, cyclical time, and indigenous time.

Our seminar explores questions like: How can emergencies in the ecological crisis be addressed? What are emergencies’ affordances and challenges in media representations of the ecological crisis? How can we integrate human-nonhuman entanglement in representation and legislation? In what ways do emergencies prompt alternative visions of the future?

We accept papers on broader topics including but not limited to ecocriticism and de-anthropocentrism as devices of representation to reflect on impending catastrophe, pre-apocalypse, shock, collapse, polycrisis in an era of ecological emergencies.