Date:
Location:
THE ENVIRONMENT FORUM
SPEAKER: Sarah Dimick
Please note that this event is open to Harvard affiliates only and registration is required.
Examining the Ugandan writer activist Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis (2021) in relation to other books written by young climate activists—including Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2018) and Jamie Margolin’s Youth To Power (2020)—this paper analyzes the wave of nonfiction prose emerging from and galvanizing the youth climate movement. It pays careful attention to genre, noting how young adult writers are retooling the memoir in light of precarious environmental futures. It also asks what is revealed and obscured in theorizing these works as environmental juvenilia.
About the Speaker
Sarah Dimick is a literary scholar working in the environmental humanities. Her work is located at the intersection of climate science and global Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries. In her broader research and teaching, she engages environmental justice, postcolonial and feminist environmentalisms, animal studies, petroaesthetics, and theories of the environmental future. Her writing appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, and Edge Effects, among other venues.
This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability
About the Series
The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University and Sarah Dimick, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.