Indigenous Speculative Fictions

Room Number: TRS 2-164

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/94564856406?pwd=NjBsUWl1Yi9mdmJwRlpjb1hhc3JNUT09

Chair: Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U)

Speakers:

Denise Handlarski (Trent U), “Teaching, learning, and reading during a climate crisis”

Heike Harting (U Montreal), “From Global Health to Planetary Health Commons in Cheri Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Anicka Yi’s ‘You Can Call Me F’”

Paola Della Valle (U Turin), “Chris Baker’s Kokupu Dreams: A Man’s Mission in a Disrupted Post-Pandemic World”

Paper Summaries:

Denise Handlarski (Trent U), “Teaching, learning, and reading during a climate crisis”

This paper argues that part of challenging climate anxiety in classrooms has to do with the curriculum itself. Through examining texts like The Marrow Thieves (Dimaline), Gun Island (Ghosh), and the poetry and fiction of Olive Senior, this paper explores how text and context function together in the climate-aware classroom.

Heike Harting (U Montreal), “From Global Health to Planetary Health Commons in Cheri Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Anicka Yi’s ‘You Can Call Me F’”

Drawing from postcolonial and indigenous concepts of the commons and decolonial commoning, this paper argues that such narratives of “planetary health commons” as Dimaline and Yi’s imagine how to inhabit the planet in common, mediate relational subjectivities and spaces to produce a shared common, while unsettling the hegemony of global health.

Paola Della Valle (U Turin), “Chris Baker’s Kokupu Dreams: A Man’s Mission in a Disrupted Post-Pandemic World”

The global pandemic, with its far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink the world we live in. The paper explores Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000), which focuses on the life of the few survivals of a pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand and sounds somehow prophetic today, in the aftermath of the Covid 19 crisis.