From Safe Havens to Monstrous Worlds: The 'Child' in Narratives of Environmental Collapse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children are widely used as emotive symbols of our shared ecological future, evoking concerns for the next generation as well as the philosophical stakes and challenges of politically addressing climate change. The 'child' as redeemer anchors the dream of transforming and healing the troubled world and functions as a beacon against the foreclosure of human history. \n \nMy doctoral study examines the cultural ubiquity of the child redeemer figure in contemporary Western narratives of environmental collapse. Literature and film serve as objects for a theoretical investigation that is informed by post-colonial, critical post-humanist and ecocritical conceptions of childhood, nature and narrative. \n \nFollowing the work of other scholars of childhood and futurity (Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Mari Ruti, Jos Esteban Muoz, Claudia Castaeda), I ask how we, as adults, might respond to children in a manner that does not reproduce the old idea of childhood innocence nor allow the adults flight of fantasy into redemption or leave the 'child' to his/her own devices. Can the 'child' exceed his/her metonymic function? What are the possibilities of delaminating the climate change story from the imperatives of a redemptive and sentimental humanism? Specifically, my project addresses the fiction of universality, which continues to thrive in the hothouse of childrens culture and education. \n \nMoving from Clio Barnards feature film The Selfish Giant (2013) to Zacharias Kunuk/Ian Mauros documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2010), each of the four chapters in this dissertation is concerned with dramatizing the limits of heroic environmental storytelling modes, which tend to emphasize the individual in isolation and thereby threaten the fragile, collective, slow labor of forging a common world and a post-carbon future. \n \nHeroic reifications and fairy-tale endings may offer consolation, I propose, but they are inadequate to address the social, structural, and ecological crises we currently, and unequally, face as nations and as a species. Shifting towards collective ways of storytelling climate change, I introduce visionary, intergenerational survival stories that give imaginative form to climate grief and resistance and address the lived and heterogeneous experiences of children in a climate-impacted world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".