What are you working with at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
I’m currently in the process of designing our Eco-Emotions course, and I’m researching how literary chronotopes (or literary spacetimes) influence contemporary High North counter-narratives, which is a lot of jargon for one sentence. Essentially, I’m looking at how and why contemporary writers create different versions of High North spaces and times. I want to see how these spacetimes counter or rely on harmful stereotypes about the Circumpolar North, and then how all of this affects their characters’ mental health and emotions. I’m also starting a project where we’re going to apply the Climate Reality Check to recent novels!
Central to both parts of my research are how characters react to climate change. Do they completely give up, or try to tackle climate change (at a societal and personal level) in positive ways we can emulate? With the second project, I’m hoping we can create a dataset to use for seeing how readers react to climate change stories, and whether fiction can be a tool for inspiring climate action.
What activity or aspect about Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
I’m looking forward to everything about the project, from the project’s interdisciplinarity, the amazing people I get to work with, all the way down to learning a bit of Old Norse through our seminars and conferences. That said, I’m extremely stoked about our Water conference this September, and I’m also very, very excited to roll out the Eco-Emotions course next school year!
What do you currently read for pleasure?
I’m currently rereading Ann-Helén Laestadius’ amazing novel, Stolen, which also happens to be part of my research on chronotope and counter-narratives. In the last while I read Invisible Things, by Mat Johnson, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, by Joseph Earl Thomas, and The Road from Belhaven, by Margot Livesey, which were each brilliant, I highly recommend all three books (and authors, too)! There are a couple threads connecting the books and authors, but thematically they take some intense, critical looks at society and our role in the world. It was also pretty fun to line up novels set in the future, present, and past one right after another.