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/