The prospect of environmental disruptions confronts us with the legacy of previous generations, reluctant politics and aggressive lobbying of extractive industries, yet we are called to act responsibly and think creatively as we are nursed with the hope that innovative and sustainable projects will save the planet. Wedged between grand-arching narratives and individual responsibility, what stories do we tell ourselves that invite suspension and disbelief while comforting ourselves with what Berlant describes as “good-life fantasies” (2)? What narratives can uphold the contradictions between goals of individual life and collective efforts in mitigating environmental disaster and social disruptions?

“Eco-anxiety,” “ecological grief” and “climate trauma” are responses to how fears are wired into a tangle of narratives with which humans tell themselves their hopes and despairs and need to be carefully considered at the site of their inscription. Assembling affective agency of environmental narratives necessarily requires an understanding of subject formation. How do we differentiate the “we” who “now wield a geological force” (Chakrabarty)? If subjecthood, as Puar ponders, is always on the brink of being institutionalized through the “standardization of a method” of inquiry (59), then it seems inadequate to capture an evolving situation spurred by environmental anxieties. We must ask ourselves how we can divest from subject formation while fulfilling the need for subjectivities-in-becoming and narratives able to challenge the usual nation-centered, techno-positive, doomsday storytelling and reproductive futurism.

We would like to discuss the “environmental vantage point [...] that frustrates the distinction between intentionality and unintentionality undergirding imaginaries and practices of refusal” (Swarbrick and Tremblay, 8; Edelman and Berlant, vii–viii). Affects, narratives, and the way the two interweave constitute dynamic relations that are constantly in flux and resist translation into viable roadmaps. Yet, precisely in this sense, fiction and storytelling become spaces where the unstable find respite and where form allows lingering exploration.

We welcome contributions or papers with an interest in:
Climate and social injustice through the perspective of colonial histories, antiblackness, indigeneity, class struggles and Queer ecologies;
The role and responsibility of narrative in relation to epistemological violence and agency of expression, environmental trauma or grief;
Positionality and subject formation in environmental narratives.