ÌÇÐÄTV

This hybrid conference follows 2022's ‘Women in World(-)Literature’ which was also held at the University of ÌÇÐÄTV.

'Women in World-Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion', urgently attends to questions about how the ecological and health impacts of the world-system are implicated by gender. Climate crisis is changing everything about how we relate to each other - from gender, racial, and labour relations, to how we conceive of borders. At the same time, scholarship, the UN, and UNESCO all agree that contagion and climate crises disproportionately effects women (Del Boca et al. 2020; Power 2020; Milford Morse and Anderson 2020; UNESCO 2022). According to a 2022 UNESCO report ‘it is estimated that 158 million women and girls are pushed into poverty as a direct result of climate change, 16 million more than the total number of men and boys’, thus it is urgent to consider how global access to resources influences the shape of contemporary culture.

This conference therefore asks: how does world-literary and world-systems thinking change when we foreground gender in our analysis of global and local crises, climate collapse, and contagion? How might attending more keenly to women's experiences and cultural production as "peripheral" agents actually upset and usurp capitalism's insistence on exchange value, and what does this offer us as an imaginary to circumvent crisis-capitalism and scarcity thinking? This conference aims to open up new routes to understanding the patriarchal world-system and how we might imagine better ways to live through this epoch of collapse. Such ways of living might focus on the interconnectedness of all people with the environment and with one another. Moreover, the inclusivity at the heart of the conference aims to show how a supportive environment of care, which refuses scarcity mindsets, generates new and unexpected collaborations, outputs, and ideas.