Speculative fiction requires massive amounts of worldbuilding in order to create realistic societies and cultures for the audience to understand. While there are many aspects of worldbuilding such as economics, religion, and politics that are highly focused on in the discussion of how to worldbuild, there are also elements of everyday society that are not discussed as thoroughly. One of these aspects is food. This includes both how food is produced in certain speculative fiction settings and how these different cultures interact with food items on a daily basis. In addition to the ways that food systems operate, this project looks into three major works of speculative fiction--Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, and the works of Tolkien--to analyze the ways that these pieces of fiction have or have not used food as a part of worldbuilding. Then, I use the research that I have done to demonstrate the ways in which the food system can be incorporated into a work of speculative fiction through the writing of my own creative piece, “Of Yoila and Yalia”. My research details the ways that speculative fiction tends to treat food as either a logistical issue or simply a differentiating cultural marker instead of a useful tool to build a culture and act as a foothold for readers as they access a world that is foreign to them. Through my research and the writing of “Of Yoila and Yalia”, I conclude that food is an important aspect of creating a society and a culture that is not only accessible to readers but is relatable and understandable. To overlook food is to disregard one of the most compelling elements of culture that people interact with on a daily basis and therefore miss much of what culture revolves around.

Media witnessing and storytelling for environmental justice (EJ) provide an avenue to understand the relationships between “multiple realities of environmental injury” and to analyze “fleeting phenomena with lasting form; thereby transforming phenomena that are experienced in a plurality of lives into publicly recognized history” (Houston, 2012, 419, 422). This creates opportunities to challenge and eradicate the oppressive structures that deem certain individuals and groups disposable and ultimately protect the possessive investment in whiteness. Therefore, for the purposes of EJ, media witnessing creates space for dynamic, citizen-based storytelling which can undermine narratives that promote the life versus economy framework that has perpetuated oppression, injustice, and state sanctioned violence. Media witnessing in an EJ context demonstrates the potential for collective understanding and action, political opportunities, and healing.<br/>This paper is an analysis of the process of media witnessing in regards to the Flint Water Crisis and the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and will apply an EJ lens to this phenomenon. It will discuss how media witnessing in response to these two crises can be used as a precedent for understanding and utilizing this framework and digital storytelling to address the crises of 2020, primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice. It will then examine how the intersectionality of race, gender, and age has implications for future media witnessing and storytelling in the context of EJ movements. Finally, it will explain how media witnessing can motivate holistic policymaking in the favor of EJ initiatives and the health and wellbeing of all Americans, as well as how such policymaking and initiatives must acknowledge the double-edged sword that is social media.

This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future.

This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.

Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.

By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.

This project uses ecocriticism to analyze prevalent issues in sustainability and resource management, as depicted in Science Fiction Literature. Through the essays in which I used the Keywords for Environmental Studies textbook by Joni Adamson et al., I analyzed how current Science Fiction novels deal with environmental issues. I then applied my findings to writing my own Science Fiction narrative, written in a Young Adult style to introduce the youth to the environmental problems we face in a creative and engaging manner.

In the story, Awaken, humans contest over territory with the avians — a sentient bid species. Years ago, the humans moved to underground dwellings in order to protect themselves from aerial assaults and developed sophisticated technology to keep the avians away from their crops. Over time, the avains became a legend humans tell their children to get them to behave, but a segment of the government remembers the real threat avians pose and are determined to vanquish their avian enemies. Kial Damian Johnson was created by his mother and father, who are involved in that segment of the government, with avian and human DNA. He finds himself drawn into the continuous battle between avians and humans. He learns that Yellowstone is going to erupt soon and neither avians nor humans can survive without sharing their resources, and he attempts to bring about peace between the two sides.

The narrative deals with issues prevalent in Animal Studies through giving the bird population a voice and a visible culture, and also reflects on current world issues as we strive to work together globally in the Anthropocene. Through researching and conducting interviews, I crafted this story to contribute to the environmental discourse. I wrote this story in a Young Adult style in order to invite the youth to engage in the conversation about issues of cross-cultural environmental sustainability.

This dissertation explores the functional purpose of imagination as it is enacted in the context of shaping large transitions in sociotechnical systems. Large sociotechnical systems undergoing profound transitions embody instantiations where societies experience profound changes in the ‘rules of the game’ that underpin the conduct of daily life. The forms of imagination that guide these transformations, known in the political theory literature as ‘imaginaries,’ play a profound yet undertheorized role in transition of sociotechnical systems from one configuration to another. Expanding on this relationship, the study draws on three case studies of energy systems change in the United States during 20th and 21st century. Each case study explores unique element of how actors at a variety of levels – transnational governance, regional electrification, and in-home energy marketing – define and the possibilities for ideal human and technological action and interaction through a transition. These actors defining the parameters of a new form of systems operation and configuration are as equally focused on defining how these new configurations shape fundamental ideas that underpin American democratic sensibility. Moreover, in the process of articulating a new configuration of energy and society – be that in terms of managing global resource flows or the automation of energy use in a residential home – questions of what makes an ideal member of a society are interlinked with new contractual relationships between energy producers and energy users. Transitions research could and should pay greater attention to the normative commitments emergent systems actors – as it is in these commitments we can chart pathways to redefine the parameters that underpin emergent transitions.

Anthropomorphic animal characters are common in animation, but there is limited data on the factors that contribute to such a trend. I studied how animated animals in popular movies look and behave like humans, and what that indicates about us that we prefer them that way. My study was conducted via literature review, film review, facial measurements, and the creation of my own character. I discovered the physical importance of eyes in proportion to the rest of the face and the emotional importance of those animals acting as metaphors for us as humans.

The elements that connect humanity to the corresponding environments that we inhabit are diverse and complex. These connections are central to understanding human interaction, our environment, and ourselves. The purpose of this thesis is to establish how connection (or lack thereof) to a region, in this instance New England, is found through environment and family. This compilation of four short stories demonstrates environmental connections via technology and familial interactions.

As parallel revolutions in publishing and environmental discourse are underway, literary journals are increasingly home to a new kind of nature writing. These journals and the writers they publish are reinventing our old definitions of nature and place by positioning humans in the center of a highly endangered but vibrantly alive world. Each publication is a testament to the importance of literature in the conservation of the planet and the power of words in connecting us to our Earth.

ABSTRACT

Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.