Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities

This edited collection, which is situated within the environmental humanities and environmental social sciences, brings together utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics from across literature, the arts, and social movements.

Featuring analyses of literary works, TV and film, theater, politics, and activism, the chapters in this volume home in on critical topics such as posthumanism, multispecies futures, agency, political ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous and settler-colonial environmental relations. The book asks: how do pandemics and ecological breakdown show us the ways that humans are deeply interconnected with the more-than-human world? And what might we learn from exploring those entanglements, both within creative works and in lived reality? Brazilian, Indian, Polish, and Dutch texts feature alongside classic literary works like Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year (1722) and Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), as well as broader takes on movements like global youth climate activism. These investigations are united by their thematic interests in the future of human and nonhuman relationships in the shadow of climate emergency and increasing pandemic risk, as well as in the glimmers of utopian hope they exhibit for the creation of more just futures.

This exploration of how pandemics illuminate the entangled materialities and shared vulnerabilities of all living things is an engaging and timely analysis that will appeal to environmentally minded researchers, academics, and students across various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

Heather Alberro is a Senior Lecturer in global sustainable development at Nottingham Trent University, in the Department of History, Heritage and Global Cultures.

Emrah Atasoy, an Associate Professor of English, is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), working at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Nora Castle is currently an independent scholar. She received her PhD in 2023 from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she also completed an Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study.

Rhiannon Firth is a Lecturer in Sociology of Education at IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She co-leads the MA modules Sociology of Education and led Gender, Sexuality and Education, and is Programme Leader for the MA Sociology of Education.

Conrad Scott holds a PhD from and is an Associate Lecturer in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands, and is an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s Honours English course on ＂The Ecological Imagination,＂ where he holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.