Green Hour: “Displacement, Environmental Citizenship, and Literary Form” (Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky)

For our third discussion, we are pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky, Chair of American Studies at the University of Augsburg. The title of her input is “Displacement, Environmental Citizenship, and Literary Form”.

Environmental displacement is “an inherent feature of this new epoch rather than an unfortunate consequence” (Lunstrum/Bose, “Environmental Displacement”, 644) and as such, it is a constitutive component also of contemporary citizenship regimes. In this project, I ask how literary texts address the link between citizenship and environmental discplacement in North America, what other categories of belonging and affiliation are explored to counter experiences of environmental displacement, and which role literary forms play for such exploration.