An interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary apocalyptic politics
We share an interest in the apocalypse, that is, a sudden, massive, global, disruptive, and destructive event that brings about the end of the world as we know it. This ancient religious idea has been revived over the past twenty years, predominantly in a secular fashion, in attitudes, fiction and ideologies. It has significant meanings and implications for politics, including trust in institutions, political authority, extreme political attitudes, and environmental politics.
We ask: Why do apocalyptic narratives seduce so widely and why now? Why are some individuals, groups or classes radically committed to the idea, and others indifferent to it? How does apocalypticism relate to other social, ideological, and political attitudes.
Our activities have been supported by the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Devepment Fund, Warwick Research Spotlights Sustainability and Culture and Society, and by the Politics And International Studies research cluster Environmental Politics.
Members of the Warwick Apocalypse Working Group
Philippe BlanchardLink opens in a new window. I am an associate professor in Warwick's department of Politics And International Studies (PAIS). My work is at the intersection of environmental politics, media studies, and social-scientific empirical methods. I am interested in apocalyptic fiction, mainly movies and novels, with a particular focus on how politics is rebuilt (or not) after most of humanity, its resources, infrastructures and institutions are wiped out. I hypothesise that the emotions, values and visions that postapocalyptic survivors, scenarios and landscapes carry echo to current political debates, including to conundrums about our well-documented slow apocalypse.
Romain ChenetLink opens in a new window. I am an associate professor at Warwick Global Sustainable Development. My teaching considers not only dissection of our creeping lived dystopias under the alienating stranglehold of elite capital accumulation at the expense of human and wider ecological flourishing, but also turns to the liberatory and emancipatory potential of both critical thought and creative practice. My research spans development, sociology, and politics in exploring globality with poststructural (Foucauldian) analysis of policy discourse alongside a recurring focus on critical development studies. Previously, I worked on global corporate relations and fundraising for large INGOs for development and humanitarian projects.
Roxanne DouglasLink opens in a new window. I am an assistant professor at the Institute of Advanced Study. I show how imagined collapse in the Global North reflects everyday consequences of climate and economic injustice in the invisible “elsewhere.” By looking ahead to the apocalypse and post-apocalypse, women writers complicate “the world” and its “ending”. I comparatively analyse Anglophone texts and texts in translation into English from diverse locales, as well as texts which are by and about trans women. Cross-culturally women activate different modes of global folklore and critical irrealism, complicating the genre of apocalypse fiction and the study of modernity as a singular and uneven unit of analysis.
Joe DavidsonLink opens in a new window. I am a research fellow at Loughborough University. My research and teaching focus on the social theory of the future. My current study explores and elucidates the value of apocalyptic narratives for developing social theoretical understanding of the climate crisis. I have published on aspects of this project in the American Political Science Review, WIREs Climate Change, Environmental Politics, and the European Journal of Social Theory. I have published Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times at the MIT Press.
Will HaighLink opens in a new window. I am a fourth-year PhD Candidate in PAIS, Warwick. My research looks at far-right extremists and how they interact with one another online. Specifically, I am studying a string of websites known as the “Chan” boards that have produced several far-right terrorists since 2018. I look at how these boards react to world events – analysing the before and after with regression modelling and thematic analysis. I engage with Social Movement Theory, Ontological Security and Lacanian Psychoanalysis, blending them together to understand why people come to the boards, how the movement operates as a whole, the motivation for posting and the purpose behind specifically labelled content.
Sadi ShanaahLink opens in a new window. I am a research fellow at PAIS. My work is in the emerging field of Global Catastrophic and Existential Risk. While in this field scholars predominantly focus on identifying risks and threats to humanity (e.g., climate change, nuclear warfare, AI, and biological technologies) and proposing how these should be governed, I research how the looming multitude of risks and threats impacts attitudes and behaviours, from policy makers to ordinary citizens. I investigate how the belief in global collapse anticipation affects attitudes that underpin liberal democratic societies, for example support for democracy as a political system, interpersonal and institutional trust, and propensity for radical and violent protest.
Andrew WilsonLink opens in a new window. I am a senior lecturer in Sociology and Criminology, University of Derby. I conceive of the apocalypse in two ways, both potentially being present within the same discourse. Firstly, as a narrativization – a revelation – of perceived and experienced crises, producing narratives that can galvanise groups and social formations or, conversely, undermine or displace their sense of personal and collective agency. Secondly, as an event already experienced by indigenous peoples, species and ecosystems, the apocalypse is the eradication of inadmissible elements from the hegemon of human political economy, with “humanity” here configured as subjectivities of production, consumption, and their sustaining capital.
