Students of literature and science are embattled on multiple fronts, as we fight against the censorship of situated and scientific knowledges–as we affirm the value of the humanities and continue to value some of the insights of STEM fields, as we support the fight for liberation from oppression and recognize how the academy can contribute to the very social hierarchies we critique. This panel invites us to look beyond our many fights against by encouraging us to envision affirmatively what we are fighting for. Inspired by adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, we wonder how change that feels like an emergency can also be an opportunity for emergence. More specifically, brown describes the culture wars we experience as battles of imagination. Invoking Octavia Butler and Claudia Rankine, they write, “If the goal was to increase love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression” (10). To attain more just, more joyful, more loving futures, we need to be able to imagine those futures first. Speculative fictions might just offer survival strategies.

The papers on this panel examine the themes of emergency and emergence across different chronotypes and theoretical traditions. Katie Brandt Sartain will begin our discussion of emergency and emergence by exploring how Mary Shelley’s The Last Man transitions from focalizing on pleasure-seeking to survival and, finally, to self-annihilation. Next, Christian Daichi Carlson invokes Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, building upon the former’s actor-network theory and the latter’s reframing of the human as a constitutive relation in a noded network. This theoretical framing allows Carlson to emphasize how Marianne Moore suggests that the experienced political anxiety, or uncertainty, of a given moment can be better mediated by practicing an ethical commitment to ecology. Building on the idea that art can be a part of this ethical practice, Julia Gatermann turns to the more-contemporary N.K. Jemisin. Through close reading, Gatermann argues that The Broken Earth trilogy offers not an escape from emergency, but a speculative meditation on emergence: the possibility of surviving, and even healing, through surrender, kinship, and embodied responsibility. Our final panelist, Kaitlin T. Moore, moves beyond the genres of fiction and poetry to analyze sound and image of a video game, Umurangi Generation. She argues that this game presents a uniquely Indigenous means of both bearing witness to ongoing ecological devastation and resisting the neoliberal and colonial institutions that attempt to obscure, sanitize, and stage reactionary interventions to that same devastation. Taken together, these papers offer glimpses into difference conceptualizations of emergency and help us imaging, through complementary frameworks, how to emerge from disaster in our present moment.