Matthew S. Henry - Extractive Fictions: Energy and Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Channel: Department of English, Arizona State University
Date: 2018-05-01

The ASU Department of English presents doctoral candidate Matthew S. Henry in a "warm-up" talk for a forthcoming presentation in Stanford University's Environmental Humanities Project lecture series.

This talk, titled "Extractive Fictions: Energy and Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene," will begin with a discussion of "extractive fictions," or cultural productions that map the uneven impacts of fossil fuel extraction on poor, ethnic minority, and indigenous communities. As a case study, it will focus on fiction, poetry, and public art exhibits that respond to socio-ecological crises associated with coal and gas development in impoverished rural communities in northern Appalachia, with an emphasis on the ways in which artists are challenging dominant narratives of extraction as a path to economic and social progress. The talk will close with an exploration of collaborative, cross-disciplinary reclamation art projects that prompt affected communities to envision post-extraction futures and an epistemological shift away from extraction culture.

Matthew S. Henry is a PhD candidate in the English at ASU. He is currently completing a dissertation entitled "Hydronarratives: Reading Water in the Anthropocene," which explores the ways in which U.S. and Anglophone writers, artists, and filmmakers frame water crises in terms of social and economic justice. His most recent scholarly and creative work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, High Country News, and Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction.

Thursday, Apr. 26, 2018
ASU Tempe campus