CURRENTS: Emily Yoon (English)

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new faculty work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Thinking Through Garbage: Living with Climate Degradation

Emily Yoon, Assistant Professor, English; Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow (Spring 2024)

In the face of climate change accelerated by capitalism, there is rightfully much attention focused on environmental degradation. However, these conditions also provide a new way of imagining how we might inhabit and navigate our various environments. In this talk, taken from her book in progress, Emily Yoon thinks about the tension between the expansive effects of climate change and the individual means of survival despite our habitats becoming increasingly polluted through examples taken from contemporary U.S. fiction. Yoon asks how we might use these texts as an invitation to think differently through the lens of climate change about disciplinary, ethnic, and diasporic identities, particularly within the context of the transpacific, the global, and the transnational.

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