Climate stories overwhelmingly centre on disasters, such as floods, fires, hurricanes, or droughts, to imagine both sudden and gradual processes of environmental destruction and ecosystem collapse. Disaster Distortion reveals that this narrative choice has profound implications in shaping what readers can imagine about climate futures and possible responses of mitigation and adaptation.
This project introduces a framework for analyzing how catastrophic thinking influences the imagination of the climate crisis across three levels:
- The rupture foundational expectations: disaster changes what counts as “normal”, shifting the baseline of expectations of business as usual. Catastrophic events suggest stark and sudden impacts for changes, while stories of slow collapse challenge attempts to establish a before or an after things stopped being the same.
- The warping of narrative form: Disasters condition in fiction questions like temporal ordering, spatial scope, representation of affected subjects, and the reliability of stable realities.
- The constraining or expansion of what becomes imaginable: Because narrative form shapes political imagination, understanding the distortion disasters inflict on narratives reveals both what is and isn’t imagined – and why.
This project explores how the placement of disasters in stories as either foregrounded events – the earthquake, the tsunami, the wildfires – and backgrounded processes – desertification, loss of biodiversity, rise in sea levels – either narrows or expands climate imagination.
Through close analysis of contemporary fiction from Japan, Mexico, and Australia, Disaster Distortion offers a systematic framework for understanding how narrative shapes the relationship between catastrophic imagination and the climate crisis.
Public Lectures and Activities
Spring activities 2026
This has also been a very active spring, which has been dominated by different conference papers that have been a nice distraction from the multiple writing commitments, mostly the ongoing monograph. In late February I presented a paper on Kawakami Hiromi’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird for the Queer Ecologies and the Temporal…
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Melbourne research stay
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…
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Summer activities 2025
This has been a very prolific and exciting summer, which started at the end of Spring and has been filled with different public activities: workshops, conferences, and symposia. As mentioned in the previous post, in May I joined Chiara Xausa and Marco Caracciolo for a workshop at Ghent University on ecofeminism, as part of the…
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Publications
Paper: “A Gentle Extinction: Interspecies Care and Deep Time in Speculative Fiction”
My paper “A Gentle Extinction: Interspecies Care and Deep Time in Speculative Fiction” is already published in early access on ISLE’s website! Speculative fiction has long imagined human extinction as a disastrous collapse. This paper proposes the concept of gentle extinction, an alternative mode of imagining this scenario based on the redrawing of humanity’s boundaries…
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Paper: Romantic Individualism and Reactionary Care in Speculative Environmental Fiction
My paper “Romantic Individualism and Reactionary Care in Speculative Environmental Fiction”, published in the journal Humanities, is available in Open Access! Speculative environmental fiction can inscribe reactionary responses to ecological crises even without intending to. This article examines Shinkai Makoto’s 2019 film and novel Weathering with You to show how it inadvertently encodes what I…
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Paper: “Care as resistance and care as hope: ecocritical affect in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary and Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime”
I am happy to announce that my paper “Care as resistance and care as hope: ecocritical affect in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary and Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime”, published in Japan Forum’s special issue on decolonising Japanese fictions, is available: This paper explores how representations of nonhegemonic politics of care intersect with environmental degradation to reimagine…
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This project is funded by a MSCA Grant and carried out between 2025 and 2027 at Ghent University.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Page | 8 V. 2024/09/12 Guidelines for MSCA-PF projects Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them
