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.

The aim of this project is to understand how environmental degradation is being framed and remembered as violence in contemporary culture, and how representations of such ecological violence articulate and reflect on questions of guilt, implication, and responsibility. Ecological violence has deep historical roots that tie it to other forms of violence, especially colonialism and genocide. Writers, artists, and filmmakers are finding ways of representing these ‘ecologies of violence,’ making visible the historical, structural and discursive links between crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.

This will be the first large-scale cross-media study of the cultural imagination of ecocide and other forms of eco-violence. Drawing on recent approaches in memory studies and ecocriticism, we will elaborate an innovative ecological approach that can account for the connections between different forms of violence and their cultural representation and memory.

This project will effect a reorientation in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism toward a conceptualization of cultural memory in more-than-human terms. Paying attention to how the histories of suffering of humans and non-humans are entangled fundamentally changes the way we think about responsibility.

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Banner images:

1. Susanne Knittel, 2024, Moreton Bay Fig, UCLA Campus, Los Angeles, California, USA (seeds brought from Australia in the 1870s). 
2. Ifor Duncan, 2024, Water Hyacinths on the reservoir of the Hidroituango Megadam, Cauca river, Colombia.  
3. Ifor Duncan, 2024, A bocachico fish on the Hidroituango Megadam, Cauca river, Colombia. 
4. Sofia Lovegrove, 2018, Tropical Botanic Garden of Belém, Lisbon, Portugal (former Colonial Garden).