The third and last research stay of the year, the one that closed the circle opened in February in Mexico and followed in June in Tokyo, brought me to Melbourne at the invitation of Debjani Ganguly and Killian Quigley from the Institute of Humanities at ACU. I spent the month of October happily shifting between endless coffee dates with researchers at the Institute and at the University of Melbourne, doing book hunting, getting elbows-deep in writing, and walking around the now quite dear areas of Fitzroy, Collingwood, and the solace of the Yarra river.
There was time too to add a short trip to Sydney to attend Marco Caracciolo’s lecture at the University of New South Wales on Weird Ecologies in Literature and Video Game Narratives. We enjoyed the hospitality of Paul Dawson, Sean Pryor, Xanthe Muston, and Shaye Easton, among other friends and colleagues. There was even time to make some sightseeing across the coast, bracing the strong spring winds.
The stay had its climatic peak with a full-day event at ACU on Anthropocene Narratives. Together with the wonderful presentations by Marco, Killian, and Kathleen Birrell, and expertly chaired by Debjani, we discussed questions of time, materiality, action, and the convergence of human and nonhuman interests in narrative. I thank the opportunity also of sharing my ongoing work on the thematic and formal narrative conditions of disaster distortion as it applies to the imagination of care, which has been my main theoretical development during this stay.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz 