Dr Adam Stock: Words, matter, and desert life

The cultural history of arid lands is richly varied, from the mythologies of Islam, Judaism and Christianity to the Orientalist imagination of fossils and ruins; and from the hypermodern architectural futurism of oil-rich states to the environmental destructiveness of nuclear infrastructure, including test sites. While their fragile, globally important ecologies are highly exposed to the climate crisis, culturally, deserts are a repository for apocalyptic and speculative imaginaries.

This lecture uses modern and contemporary SF texts to show how arid lands are mobilized in climate change discourse. I argue arid lands are uniquely positioned as spaces from which to observe the culture of the era known as the Anthropocene. How deserts are mobilised in such discourse matters to where and how the climate crisis is made visible. The marginality of these spaces is central to their value in demonstrating imaginative possibilities beyond catastrophic images of contemporary climate collapse.

6.00pm - 7.00pm - Lecture

7.00pm - 8.00pm - Drinks reception

Dr Adam Stock is senior lecturer in English Literature at York St John University. His research focuses on utopian, dystopian and science fictions, set within a wider interest in relations between politics and popular culture. His recent work has appeared in journals including Apocalyptica and C21 Literature and edited volumes such as The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature. He is author of the book Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics (Routledge, 2019).

Adam is currently working on an international collaborative project on dystopia migration, as well as writing his second book, titled Arid Imaginaries: Deserts and Speculative Fictions. This work has been supported by a residential fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic Study (CAPAS), Heidelberg University (2024).

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