University of Cologne

(in collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen)

The project makes a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of interdisciplinary climate change communication and against the background of science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the contribution of the humanities. It thus responds to urgent calls by scholars and policy-makers to address the challenge of climate change by paying attention to the complex embeddedness of climate change in individual and sociocultural contexts. Rather than offering ‘cli-fi’ book recommendations and reducing the function of literature either to a more pleasurable form of information transfer or to the affective dimension of evoking sympathy or concern, it develops a new notion of climate change literacy that is built on a reassessment of the cognitive, affective, and pedagogic potentials of literary writing. After laying the necessary theoretical groundwork, it moves to illustrate the specific contribution literary studies can make to an adequate understanding of and response to climate change through the analysis of a selection of popular contemporary climate novels. The project group consists of three scholars with expertise in interdisciplinary literary studies, cultural literacies, and education for sustainability.

Funded by the VW Foundation (Az.: 9A794)

October 2020-September 2021

Together with Professor Karen Ragoonaden (University of Manitoba, CAN), who joins the UCologne on a fellowship by the Erich Auerbach Institute of Advanced Studies in the winter term 2021, I am working on a project called “On Wellbeing and Resilience in Humanist Teacher Education: Literature, Pedagogy, and the Modelling of Mindful Futures” and that sits at the intersection of pedagogy and literary education.

More info: Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, Cologne

In various publications and talks I am exploring the intersections of educational and literary theories and the potentials of such a transversal outlook for literature pedagogy and the practice of teaching literatures and cultures in ELT contexts from primary school to university-level education.

Output (selection):

Research monograph (edited with Julia Hoydis): Teaching the Posthuman (Winter 2019). (LINK)

Open-Access Journal publication (edited with Julia Hoydis): Reading in Ruins – Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies (Open Library of Humanities, publication in 2020).

Research article: "Literature Pedagogy in the Anthropocene" (in: The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. Eds. Gabriele Dürbeck & Philip Hüpkes. Routledge, 2020).

Research article: "Posthumanism in Theory and (Reading) Practice" (in: New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach & Birgit Neumann. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Keynote presentation: "Posthumanism and Literary Learning: Lessons in Relatability", (6. Tag der Englischdidaktik, Augsburg University, 2020).

The project investigates cultures of death and imaginaries as well as practices of dying in light of the existential threats of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss and explores the pedagogic implications for a sustainability education in times of large-scale species extinction and the pre-trauma of run-away climate change.

Output (selection):

Keynote presentation: “Teaching Ani­ma­li­ty in the Face of Extinc­tion” (Teaching Human-Animal Studies, Leuphana University Lüneburg, 2020).

Conference presentation: “‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’? Death, Extinction, and the Limits of Competence Orientation” (Taboo Topics in Foreign Language Education, Würzburg University, 2020).

Lecture Seminar: “The Pandemic Imagination: Reading and Teaching Fictions of Crisis" (University of Cologne, Winter 2020)

Lecture Series (with Ute Planert): "a.r.t.e.s. moriendi" (as part of the a.r.t.e.s. Research Master programme) (University of Cologne, Summer 2021)

The project is associated with the research network FAUNA, an independent network of scholars interested in animal studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. FAUNA investigates the forms and significance of human-nonhuman relations in the social, cultural, and political life and historical genesis of human societies. See our Website.

(mit Prof Andreas Köpfer, Freiburg)

www.dilikus.de

Die Reihe „Diversitätsorientierte Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachdidaktik“ (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier) stellt sowohl  anwendungsbezogene Forschung der Schulentwicklung und Unterrichtsforschung in Zeiten erhöhter bzw. verstärkt wahrgenommener Heterogenität als auch für Grundlagenforschung in den Bereichen der Inter-/Transkulturalität vor, der Mehrsprachigkeit und einer Pädagogik der Vielfalt und Anerkennung, die sich dezidiert mit den Implikationen für und Möglichkeiten der fachdidaktischen Praxis auseinandersetzt.

Band 1: Inklusion und Nachhaltigkeit (Hg. Roman Bartosch und Andreas Köpfer).

Band 2: Language Awareness bei mehrsprachigen Kindern (Johanna Jördening).

Band 3 (i.V.): Inklusion und Deutsch als Zweitsprache als Querschnittsaufgabe in der Lehrer*innenbildung (Hg. Anna Grosshauser, Andreas Köpfer und Hanna Siegismund).

Band 4 (i.V.): Transformative Literature Pedagogy (Hg. Roman Bartosch).