Over the past few years, Professor Pinkus' research has involved the possible contribution of the humanities can make to the discussion of climate change. Most of her work has been of a speculative nature.
While most scientists embrace the idea that the problems of climate change are so enormous that we need to summon allresources – including the expertise of the humanities – in order to confron them, they necessarily tend to operate along practical lines. Yet the humanities – in as much as they continue to exist in a crisis – are by nature impractical.
In her current work in progress, a book on fuels, Karen is trying to reconcile the impractical, speculative questions raised by the humanities with a desre for hope. Hope is not located in any particular technology or policy, or in any social formation such as the multitude or social movement like Occupy. Karen locates hope in fuels – distinguished from systems of energy or power – as pure potentiality which the seminar will eplore through narrative and images.
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University where she is also a Faculty Fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She is author of many books and articles on literary, cinematic and visual culture (most recently Alchemical Mercury, a Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford University Press). Kaen is also the editor of a special edition of diacritics on climate change criticism, which reflects on the nuclear criticim issue 30 years on.
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