What would it mean to take up environmental crisis as a form of address? What kinds of responses do encounters with nonhuman life, elemental forces, and damaged environments demand? Instead of presuming that environmental harm merely requires better representation, this seminar asks how cultural forms may themselves become sites of relation and response: ways of listening to damaged worlds, reckoning with the ever-accumulating debts in which they implicate us, and imagining entanglements that do not begin or end with human mastery. In floods, fires, storms, toxic atmospheres, exhausted soils, damaged reefs, ritual plants, stranded algae, and eroded coastlines, for instance, “the environment” does not merely appear as setting, resource, or metaphor. Rather, it carries history, disrupts inherited categories, and demands to be engaged with as an active, constitutive force in our shared social, political, and aesthetic worlds.

This seminar invites papers that consider how literature, film, performance, visual culture, philosophy, theory, and other cultural forms register the unsettled debts disclosed by environmental harm. We are especially interested in work that explores how cultural forms attend to the more- or otherwise-than-human without reducing it to symbol, scenery, instrument, or mute witness. How might storms, plants, waters, soils, atmospheres, animals, minerals, and toxic residues call forth modes of response that exceed familiar frameworks of agency, responsibility, mourning, repair, and justice? What forms of relation become possible, or impossible, when damaged environments are understood not merely as objects of representation but as forces that address, interrupt, remember, and demand?

By “debt,” this seminar does not presume a calculable moral ledger or a reparative program through which harm can be settled. Rather, we are interested in forms of indebtedness that can never be discharged: relations to beings, forces, and histories that exceed reciprocity, compensation, and mastery. Thinking with and beyond work on bad debt, the gift, relation, opacity, decolonial ecologies, more-than-human entanglement, and environmental justice, we ask how response emerges in conditions of asymmetry, exposure, dependency, and damage. We invite papers that consider how cultural forms stage these unsettled relations formally as well as thematically: through voice, rhythm, scale, genre, fragmentation, opacity, repetition, silence, ritual, performance, archival absence, or material trace.

We welcome papers that think across environmental humanities, Black studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, feminist studies, science and technology studies, animal studies, plant studies, oceanic and elemental media studies, deconstructive ethics, performance studies, and related fields.