Please join us for this seminar as visiting PhD Student Mridula Sharma shares some of her ongoing dissertation research.

As always, this CEH TALK is open to everyone and free to attend. Coffee and tea provided.

For more information about Mridula and her research, click here.

Abstract
This talk considers the discourse of futurity by bringing together the intellectual resources of postcolonial studies and environmental humanities. I look at texts from Palestinian and Kashmiri writers and artists as I take up the question of a future after the formal end of settler colonialism in the present context of the climate crisis. I approach the question of alternative futures by looking at the multiply-inflected figures of children and youth, to whose birth and death multiple meanings are attributed. The figures of children and youth fulfil a dual purpose. Both signify the possibility of resisting settler colonial occupation: the child births the nation and the youth becomes a symbol to perform political action in pursuit of resistance. Both are also symbols in whose name resistance is pursued: it is for protecting the child and securing the honour of martyred youth that resistance gets legitimised. The politicisation of the figures of children and youth takes a similar form in contemporary climate activism: the absence of children is treated as political action on the one hand and the presence of youth is viewed as the presence of political actors on the other; the idea that the absence of children is political action is mostly endorsed in anti-natalist environmental philosophy, whereas the perception of youth as political actors is popular in environmental curriculum studies. Attention to the figures of children and youth in discourses on settler colonialism and climate crisis signals how assumptions about age and agency inform pertinent questions about a liveable future. I turn to Palestinian and Kashmiri texts to examine how these figures are being evoked. Ultimately, I argue that these texts allow us to resist the figures of children and youth as emblems of futurity, and reshape the way in which we imagine and mobilise for alternative futures.