Gras Lecture in the Environmental Humanities
Monday, April 14, 2025 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, Fenwick Library Reading Room
The connection between struggles for social justice and environmental conservation has transformed North American environmentalism over the last two decades under the labels of environmental justice, political ecology, and the environmentalism of the poor. Multispecies justice, a new paradigm that has emerged over the last decade, has sought to expand environmental justice thinking beyond the boundaries of the human species by reconceptualizing who or what is considered a subject of justice, who is included in communities of justice, and how concepts of justice differ across cultural communities. This lecture will explore what role different forms of narrative, from documentary films and popular scientific reporting to science fiction, play in defining and imagining multispecies communities of justice in the context of climate change. It will focus on the strategies such narratives deploy to engage with more-than-human characters, plots, and policy decisions, in what ways they help concretize theories of multispecies justice, and the challenges they encounter in opening up a human – and typically anthropocentric – medium to more-than-human forms of experience.
Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature; environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; narrative theory; media theory; literature and science; and science fiction. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010), and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Heise is the Managing Editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor, with Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011.
