A widely cited 2021 survey of ten thousand young people in ten countries found that most believed humanity was doomed and that governments had betrayed them. These emotions of grief, dread, and the sense of having inherited someone else's ruin have found their most sustained literary expression in fiction written for the young. Amitav Ghosh's claim that the serious novel cannot accommodate climate has, for two decades, been answered by a body of work that criticism still treats as pedagogy rather than art. This seminar takes young adult climate fiction seriously as a comparative literary form.

The seminar is interested in what happens when the future is addressed to those who will live in it. YA climate narrative is where futurity is most explicitly thematised and most heavily policed, as the young emerge at once as heirs, victims, saviours, and political subjects whose anger is celebrated and contained in the same gesture. The genre also carries an obligation the so called adult novel does not: a felt duty to leave its readers able to go on. This makes the genre and their forms a revealing test case for the politics of consolation.

The seminar asks: What formal resources does YA bring to climate through examples such the verse novel, the diary, first-person present tense, the rotating narrator, the trilogy's uneasy relation to endings? How does the genre negotiate honesty and hope, and who decides where that line falls: authors, publishers that platform them, or educators? What becomes of the child-as-future when reproductive futurity is itself in question? How do bodies get remade for damaged worlds, and what do disability and adaptation reveal about which futures are planned? And  finally, what does the field look like beyond Anglo-American and Eurocentric publishing?

Papers might address Sarah Crossan, Paolo Bacigalupi, Saci Lloyd, Julie Bertagna, Suzanne Collins, Lauren James or Neal Shusterman; Indigenous futurisms in Cherie Dimaline, Darcie Little Badger and Ambelin Kwaymullina; Global South and diasporic writing by Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Lilliam Rivera, Bijal Vachharajani, Ranjit Lal or Lani Wendt Young; and work beyond English, such as by Marie Pavlenko and Aurélie Wellenstein in French, Alberto Chimal in Spanish, and Emmi Itaranta in Finnish,  Untranslated corpus, translation histories, and transnational comparisons are especially welcome.

Possible themes include but not limited to are: eco-grief, solastalgia, and the clinical vocabulary of climate anxiety; scarcity, rationing, and enclosure; extraction, waste, and toxic labour; climate migration and borders; sovereignty and land; species loss and interspecies kinship; engineered adaptation and its eugenic shadow; youth activism and its co-optation; and YA's pedagogical afterlife in the age where practices of both vocational and leisurely reading are in decline.  

 Graduate students, contingent and independent scholars are warmly encouraged to submit abstracts.