Deadline: Dec. 1, 2026
Contact: Rebecca Oh, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email: rsoh@illinois.edu

Environmental humanists and literary scholars have many genres for theorizing environmental fear, injustice, despair, or pessimism. Environmental gothic, noir, picaresque, horror, and crime fiction are all genres theoretically defined by and committed to engaging with exploitation and terror in historically and formally specific ways. And the hermeneutic of suspicion, devoted to diagnosing and revealing obscured forces and causes, is especially attuned to those that produce systemic violence. We know how to read for necropolitics, colonialism and neocolonialism, anti-Blackness, objectification, and misogyny.
What, conversely, are the genres we draw on to theorize or illustrate environmental hope, joy, relationality, care, community, or other positive stances toward futurity? Utopian and speculative fictions come to mind most readily, but what other, less obvious genres also give form, structure, and cognitive coherence to hope and positive futurity (in the sense of both doing-good and feeling-good, generative practices, thoughts, and potentials as well as affects)?

In a different vein, does hope resist generic framing and coding? Should environmental hope or positive futurity be understood instead primarily as a process or action that requires specific methods to become visible? Outside the hermeneutic of suspicion, what methods do we have to read for hope or generative futurity against the deep entrenchment of violence that saturates the present?

This roundtable invites presentations on genres and methods for thinking, apprehending, sensing, representing, fabulating, or historicizing hope as a complex but committed orientation toward collective futures. Potential topics could include but are not limited to: specific genres useful for theorizing or giving form to hope, methods of reading hope or reading for hope, arguments about the affordances of particular genres/genre theory or particular methodologies and heuristics for illuminating hope or other positive orientations toward environmental futurity.

Please submit 300-word abstracts to rsoh@illinois.edu by Dec. 1, 2026.

Posted on September 28, 2026