EcoFutures Climate Justice Project

Today’s escalating climate chaos is intensified by global threats to democracy, violent backlashes to migration, and horrific biodiversity loss. Furthermore, environmental degradation is exacerbating existing inequalities, with poor and marginalized people bearing the brunt of crises they had virtually no hand in creating. Mainstream climate discourse often sees the most impacted people as disposable, or as victims to be saved by top-down interventions that maintain the same order that gave rise to the catastrophe. But truly useful engagement with the climate crisis must involve not only technology, but also alternate visions of social and economic arrangements, and different ways of thinking about the interrelationships of humans with the broader natural world. These fresh perspectives are likely to come from the marginalized and oppressed. Indigenous people, despite being less than 10% of the world’s population, protect 80% of its biodiversity, and have a long history of living with other species without destroying them. The “most vulnerable” often exhibit a remarkable capacity to survive, as well as creativity and adaptability under difficult conditions and scarce resources.

This project will look to people at the margins of the current global order, creating speculative fiction and nonfiction that imagines actionable, inspiring, bottom-up solutions and adaptations in the face of a world dangerously in flux. We will focus on India—a geographically and culturally diverse and severely climate-stressed nation which is also among the most densely populated regions in the world, and ranks high on measures of social and economic inequality.

EcoFutures will publish a quarterly serial, featuring speculative fiction, nonfiction, and other creative work on climate justice. Each issue will feature an original creative work and a response essay by a scholar or activist, along with other materials (interviews, book reviews, translations). At the end of the series, we will collect materials from the serial issues into a free ebook, with an accompanying print edition.

Our creative writers will craft their visions of the future in collaboration with scholars and activists, grounding their work in the latest thinking about technology, politics, sociology, philosophy, culture, legal theory, and more.

The EcoFutures project is supported by CoFutures at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, and the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.

EcoFutures Issues

Issue 1, October 2021, featuring contributions by Easterine Kire, Rebecca Tsosie, Vandana Singh, and Kyle Whyte

Project Leads

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is senior researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is the founding series editor (with Taryne Taylor) of Routledge Studies in Global Genre Fiction, editor-in-chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, and editor at the Journal of Science Fiction. He is the editor ofthe book Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories.

Joey Eschrich is the editor and program manager at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, and assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU, Slate magazine, and New America on emerging technologies, culture, and society. He has edited several books of science fiction and nonfiction, including Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, which was funded by a grant from NASA.

Vandana Singh is a professor of physics at Framingham State University, a transdisciplinary scholar of climate change, and a science fiction author. Her short story collection Ambiguity Machines, from Small Beer Press and Zubaan Books, was No. 1 on Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten in Science Fiction, was named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and earned praise from Wired, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times.

Creative Writers

Gladson Dungdung is an activist, author, researcher, public speaker, and motivator. He is founder of the Adivasis Publications. He comes from the Kharia Adivasi community in Jharkhand (India). He has authored several books, including Endless Cry in the Red Corridor, Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India, and Whose Country Is It Anyway? – Untold Stories from India’s Indigenous Peoples. He has also published more than 500 articles and spoken globally on indigenous issues. He received the Samata Ratan Award in 2014 for his extraordinary work for the Adivasi communities of India.

Jacinta Kerketta is a poet, writer, and freelance journalist. In her poems, she highlights the injustices committed against Adivasi communities, along with their struggles. Her poems are also important cultural and artistic documents of Adivasi worldviews. She is the author of two bilingual (Hindi and English) full-length collections of poems: Angor (Adivani, Kolkata) and Jodon Ki Jameen (Bharatiya Jnanpith, New Delhi).

Easterine Kire is a poet, short story writer, children’s book writer, and novelist from Nagaland. She has been awarded, among others, the Hindu Literature Prize for 2015, as well as the Tata Litlive Book of the Year and the Bal Sahitya Puraskar in 2018 for her works. Her books have been translated into Norwegian, German, and Marathi.

Mimi Mondal is a speculative fiction writer and editor, and the first Hugo Award nominee from India. Her first book, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited along with Alexandra Pierce, received the Locus Award in Non-fiction in 2018 and was a finalist for the Hugo Award in Best Related Work and the British Fantasy Award in Non-fiction. Between 2017 and 2018, Mimi worked as the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine, a three-times-Hugo-Award-winning magazine of science fiction and fantasy. She was also an editor at Penguin India between 2012 and 2013.

Dr. Gogu Shyamala is one of the foremost contemporary Dalit voices in India, and a writer, author, and poet in Telugu. Her English collection of short stories Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But… has been translated into German, and some stories into French. She produced a biography of T.N.Sadalakshmi, the first Dalit woman legislator in Andhra Pradesh. Her earlier volume Nallapoddu (Black Dawn), a collection of Dalit women’s writing from across Andhra Pradesh, has won critical acclaim in the Telugu literary world. She participated in the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, the Australian Indian Literary Festival in 2013, a literary workshop in Germany in 2016, and in the Jaipur International Festival in 2012. She has worked on issues of domestic violence among Dalit women. She was also a coeditor of The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. Her writing has been used in higher education syllabi by the government of Telangana and at the University of San Francisco. Her work has been translated into Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu. She completed her PhD dissertation, “Reading Caste Histories through Biographies: A Case Study of the Dalit Women of Telangana,” in 2019 at the Department of Social Exclusion Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, Telegana.

Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe), Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies Program, Portland State University