Future Ethics: Disaster, Catastrophe, Apocalypse

During my 4-year Global Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies I am undertaking a project called 'Future Ethics: Disaster, Catastrophe, Apocalypse'. The research explores understandings of ethics in contemporary popular culture, focusing on disastrous, apocalyptic and catastrophic future scenarios in the context of climate change. For example, the project looks at film and literature in which climate change is presented as something catastrophic, ending human life and civilization as we know it, or where we are presented with a post-environmental-apocalypse landscape where subjects exist in a modern-day ‘state of nature’ in which other humans are encountered as enemies. The research seeks to analyse how these narrations of future scenarios frame our understandings of ethics, to identify the political implications of these understandings, and to explore possible sites where alternatives might be found.