Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination

• Duration: 2024-2029
• Funding: European Research Council, Consolidator Grant
• Project Leader: Susanne Knittel

The ongoing destruction of the natural world raises critical questions about responsibility. How do we remember the victims, both human and non-human? And how do we negotiate the difficult question of who is to blame, especially in situations where we are all in one way or another implicated? Contemporary culture plays a crucial role in addressing these questions.

EcoViolence explores the crucial role culture, and specifically cultural memory plays in shaping our understanding of the current environmental crisis and how we are implicated in it. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a surge of cultural works that recall and document past and ongoing histories of extinction, deforestation, pollution, resource extraction, and other forms of ecological violence. The project posits that these works frame and remember environmental degradation as violence by drawing on repertoires, forms, and conventions familiar from the representation and commemoration of genocides and other acts of large-scale violence against humans. This also allows them to make visible the deep historical links that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide. EcoViolence brings together research in cultural memory studies, new materialism, and ecocriticism to develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence, its memory and representation.

Project team: Ifor Duncan (postdoc); Sofia Lovegrove Pereira (PhD candidate); Tom van Bunnik (PhD candidate)

For more info about the project, its events and publications, click here.