Behind the Headlines | Waste Lands: Imagining Climate Catastrophe

Recorded November 10, 2022 Responding to the devastation of the
First World War, in 1922 T.S. Eliot wrote of showing us ‘fear in a
handful of dust’, in his monumental poem, The Waste Land. On the
centenary of the poem’s first full publication, this Behind the
Headlines discussion confronts the ecological devastation of
contemporary global landscapes, and ask: does the creative
imagining of landscape ruination, destruction, and even apocalypse
amount to effective protest? In this panel, we hear from
award-winning Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman; Cathriona Russell,
Assistant Professor, Trinity School of Religion; Yairen Jerez
Columbié, Assistant Professor, Trinity School of Languages,
Literatures and Cultural Studies; and Conor Brennan, PhD candidate
in Trinity’s Department of Germanic Studies. They discuss whether
the aesthetic depiction of waste lands – in art, film, or
literature – prompt us to action, or simply to despair. The
postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has written that ‘[T]he
crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their
disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions’
(The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 2021). In responding to
this call, how can the Arts and Humanities best mobilise their
resources to address the climate crisis, and what role does the
imagination play in this task? Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/