The text on the graphic reads: "Near-Extinction Narratives: A form of literary writing that reframes extinction as part of a larger, intergenerational, and interspecies trajectory, Catriona Flesher and Anisha Gamblin, PhD researchers at University of Leeds, Rachel Carson Center, Critical Concepts."

"Near-extinction narratives describe a form of literary writing that reframes extinction as part of a larger, intergenerational, and interspecies trajectory. By moving away from the concept that extinction is simply the final death of a species, we can begin to expand our ideas of what extinction entails. Near-extinction narratives thus emerge as an aesthetic category and genre that, in the broader contexts of ecological loss and extinction crises, explores a proximal and affective nearness to nonhuman creatures—those that are deemed critically endangered or not. Catriona Flesher and Anisha Gamblin, PhD researchers at University of Leeds."

Today's #CriticalConcept is "Near-Extinction Narratives" by PhD researchers Catriona Flesher and Anisha Gamblin (University of Leeds). They presented at the Lunchtime Colloqium "Extinction and Its Discontents."
#rccresearch #narratives #envhum #extinction #nearextinction #literary #writing #lmu #rcc

This is a Critical Concept. Title: Weird Ecology. Highlighted quote: "The weird as a theory for thinking ecologically disrupts a host of supposedly neat categories of genre." Author: Alison Sperling, Assistant Professor at Floria State University. Image credit: Canva Creative Studio.

The full concept reads: “The weird as an ecocritical category, aesthetic, affect, or otherwise offers a touchpoint for (attempting to) grasp modes of experience in an age in which climate irregularities continue to derange frameworks of temporal and spatial understanding, resist representation, and refuse coherent systems analysis. Similar to the way in which "global weirding" rejects the notion that climate change could be effectively reduced, captured, or totalized by a single symptom (warming), the weird as a theory for thinking ecologically disrupts a host of supposedly neat categories of genre (as weird fiction does), as well as poses important challenges to the ways in which we index, periodize, archive, and think more broadly about environment and about “the world.”” by Alison Sperling, Assistant Professor at Floria State University

We are restarting #CriticalConcepts for the semester with this beautiful concept by Alison Sperling. Coming from a literature and culture studies perspective, Alison questions the boundaries of genre and, more broadly, how we see and categorize "the world."

#rccresearch #ecology #weird #envhum #rcc