Culture, Transport, Global Warming
Editor: Dr. Tatiana Prorokova
One of humanity’s most serious problems, climate change is clearly a ‘human-made’ catastrophe. Various factors have contributed to global warming now turning into reality. One of the most significant, along with power generation and industry, is of course CO2 omissions from transport using fossil fuels. While both technological progress and climate change are popular themes in literature, film, and the visual arts, the equivalent cultural obsession with these issues is both scary and paradoxical. Cultural media have celebrated the might of technology, the necessity of mechanization, and humanity’s inability to exist and progress without transport by air, water, and land. At the same time many vigorously powerful narratives draw audiences’ attention worldwide to the problem of climate change caused by industrialization that transportation immensely intensifies.
This collection aims to trace the enigmatic and tacit relationship between global warming and transport through the examination of various cultural artifacts (films, TV-series, novels, graphic novels, photography, etc.) to understand how through extensive depictions, they have created a cultural understanding of humanity’s addiction to and obsession with transport on the one hand, and its myopic attitude to the inevitability of the drastic ramifications of environmental changes and/or a pathological fear of global warming, on the other.
The editor invites interested contributors to send their abstracts of 300 words and short bios to tatiana.prorokova@gmx.de until February 1, 2018. The file should be titled as follows: Last Name_Abstract & Bio and should include your email address. Selected authors will have to submit their chapters of no longer than 7,500 words (Chicago Manual of Style) until May 1, 2018.
About the editor: Tatiana Prorokova is currently working on her second book project that examines representations of the environment and climate change in fiction since the Industrial Revolution (financed through the Equal Opportunity Scholarship for Outstanding Female Junior Scholars, MARA, the University of Marburg, Germany). She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany, a European Join Master’s Degree in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg, Germany, and a Teaching Degree in English and German from Ryazan State University, Russia. In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Alabama, USA (English Department & Center for the Study of War and Memory). Her research interests include ecocriticism, war studies, and gender studies, and are reflected in her publications in academic journals and edited collections. She is a co-editor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (forthcoming in 2018 with Rutgers University Press).