School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Zita Joyce George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead opens at a transitional point between ordinary life and the dystopian future. A television studio is in chaos as its staff argue about the zombie crisis, unable to communicate authoritatively with their viewers or to comprehend what is happening ‘outside’. This scene is emblematic of the role of broadcasting in accounts of the transition to dystopia, triggered by zombies, plagues, climactic shifts or extraterrestrial events. News or weather reports document the dissolution of everyday life, static fills the screen or speaker, the empty dial is scanned for human voices, signs of other survivors, the last hopes that all is not yet lost. This paper will trace the role of broadcast media in accounts of the zombie (or other) apocalypse, recalling early utopian dreams of radio’s ability to communicate with the dead, and the more pragmatic concerns of broadcasting’s role in the crises to come. Zita Joyce is a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Margaret Atwood’s fiction has explored the politics of risk since at least the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. In that novel, environmental degradation (especially from chemical pollution and nuclear radiation) is identified as a contributing cause of the decline of birth rates in the ‘pre-Gileadic’ United States. But in her more recent speculative novels, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), the unchecked progress of climate change – evident in rising sea levels, shifts in weather patterns and seasons and ozone depletion – joins the unchecked progress of genetic engineering to become a double-stranded thread woven into her textual representations of a social/political (d)evolution. In paper, I connect current psychology studies of risk perception and willed ignorance to Atwood’s analysis of corporate responsibility and personal complicity in an imagined ecodisaster that threatens to bring an end to history itself. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor is Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at the University of Memphis. A member of the faculty since 1990, her research and publication interests include nineteenth-century British literature, as well as utopian literature. She has published articles on women’s literature in both of those research areas.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Sean McMullen This paper is based on a story of mine, ‘The Precedent’, that will be published in The Magazine of Fantasy of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and which is currently being developed as a film script. In the paper, I propose a utopian vision developing whereby the next generation does not try to balance the current western lifestyle with the limits of the Earth to support that lifestyle, but criminalises the concept of growth economics at every level. The idea of utopia is largely social in origin, so that a change in society’s values can throw up a model that we might view as dystopian, yet seems very reasonable to a future generation. In ‘The Precedent’, I have postulated a scenario in 2035 where entire generations of middle-aged to elderly people are put on trial and executed as climate criminals. Driving this utopia/dystopia is the generation that has inherited a poisoned, warming and resource-poor world. It is a version of the Nuremberg trials on a global scale, for everyone born after 2000. Sean McMullen is one of Australia’s top science-fiction and fantasy authors. In the late 90s, he established himself in the American market, and his work has been translated into Polish, French, Japanese and other languages. The settings for Sean’s work range from the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe, to cities of the distant future.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Andrew Chrystall McLuhan’s (1964) reflection on the ‘science fiction’ of William S. Burroughs critiques eco-discourses that ignore human-made environments – media and technology – and present simplistic, romantic ideas of unmediated, wild nature as the environment. According to McLuhan: (1) electronic information systems are nature and/or live environments in the full organic sense; (2) ‘nature’, as figure, needs to be discussed historically and in view of how it has been swallowed, digested and made the content of successive media environments; (3) artistic and literary eco-utopias and dystopias are reactionary expressions of our new natures – when a technology is new it yields utopias and, when the full consequences of a new technology are manifest, dystopias and/or millennial visions catastrophe appear strongly. This paper seeks to develop McLuhan’s reflections and bring them into the orbit of our new nature, contemporary eco-criticism(s), and our situation where visions of catastrophe and utopia co-exist simultaneously. Andrew Chrystall is a lecturer in the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University. His work unfolds from the interdisciplinary approach of McLuhan, the Toronto School of Communication and Media Ecology.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Peter Marks Utopian spaces often survive even in dystopias depicting global ecological catastrophes. They can operate as oases of plenty in otherwise devastated worlds, as symbols of survival and potential renewal, or as fragile zones inevitably overrun by malevolent environmental forces. Taking Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 and Alfonso Curon’s Children of Men as examples, this paper explores how – and to what purpose – the utopian spaces are created and maintained. It focuses closely on surveillance processes, structures and technologies, examining the ways in which the borders separating these adjacent and sometimes intersecting worlds are patrolled and enforced, and to what effect. How are the different spaces internally monitored? Is the identity and freedom of those on either side of the borders protected, controlled or threatened? And given the dire environmental circumstances, do these utopian zones function as the last vestiges of worlds on the verge of extinction, or as potential spaces of hope? Peter Marks is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Sydney.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Kate Rigby Opening address: ‘Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe – the third Australian conference on utopia, dystopia and science fiction’. Kate Rigby is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her most recent book is Topographies of the Sacred (2004), an ecocritical study of European Romantic-era philosophies and aesthetics of nature and place.

Writers and their world | Robert Gray A reading from his poetry By Robert Gray Robert Gray is a poet, critic and freelance writer. His highly imagistic poetry is notable for its evocations ofnature, the rural and urban working classes and intimate family relationships. He has published 12 volumes ofpoetry, including Creekwater Journal (1973), Lineations (1996) and Afterimages (2002). Robert Gray has won the Adelaide Arts Festival Award, the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers' Awards and the Age Book of the Year for his poetry. The last recipient of the Patrick White Award before the author's death in 1990, Gray has since released a memoir, The Land I Came Through Last (2008), which contains an account of their friendship.

From Sappho to X | Peter Snow Performance and Adaptation | Peter Snow

From Sappho to X | Margaret Reynolds Like Mother, Like Daughter | Margaret Reynolds

From Sappho to X | Panel Discussion Reinventing Hypatia – playwright panel discussion

From Sappho to X | Elizabeth Hale Popping Out as Romans: Children, Precocity, and Classical Performance in Henry James and beyond | Elizabeth Hale

From Sappho to X | Alison Richards X marks the spot: embodying gaps in the Classics | Alison Richards

From Sappho to X | Page Du Bois Besides Aphrodite: Sappho, Ritual, and Performance | Page Du Bois

From Sappho to X | Emma Cole Sacrifice of Iphigenia | Emma Cole

From Sappho to X | Rachel Kirk ‘Rethinking Plautus: Theatre Translation and Performability’ | Rachel Kirk