English Exposed: Vulnerability and Hope in Culture and Language

Marco Caracciolo "Embodiment and Vulnerability in Climate Fiction"

“The planet is sick” is a common metaphor for the environmental crisis: it works by mapping illness onto ecological processes. This metaphor goes hand in hand with how the discourse of vulnerability is mobilized in both environmental discourse and climate fiction: preventing ecological collapse becomes an extension of embodiment (and its breakdowns) to the planetary.

This talk examines how embodied concepts such as vulnerability and care inform the way we think about environmental processes. It draws on discussions in ecofeminism--particularly work by Astrida Neimanis and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa--to reveal how scaling up vulnerability to ecological processes involves significant conceptual and ethical tensions. The talk argues that contemporary fiction offers unique insight into these tensions. Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) provides the main example. The novel draws an explicit connection between planetary crisis and the terminally ill body of the protagonist’s mother, showing how vulnerability, care, and the planetary are complexly and uneasily intertwined. This discussion will help advance arguments on the need to transform the imaginary of the body to address the challenges of climate change.

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Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University in Belgium. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). Between 2017 and 2022 he led the ERC-funded NARMESH project at Ghent University, which focused on negotiations of the nonhuman in contemporary narrative. He is the author of several books, including most recently Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). He received the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative for his 2022 book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (University of Nebraska Press).

Hannah Lowe "Vulnerable Lives, Precarious Histories: Fragments, Silence and Memory Work"

How do we write lives that survive only in fragments? Photographs and objects, archival traces and inherited memories can illuminate the past, but they can also reveal its omissions and silences. 

At the centre of this talk is my ongoing poetry and memoir project about my Afro-Chinese Jamaican family history, particularly the life of my aunt Nelsa Lowe, a businesswoman and folk healer whose story exists in a series of partial and often contradictory records. This incomplete and precarious archive has led me to explore what it means to write in the presence of silence, uncertainty and loss. Rather than treating gaps in the archive as problems to be solved, I consider how incompleteness can become a method of attention, inviting us to see, listen and create differently .

The talk will also reflect on my writing concerned with Jamaican medicinal plants and vernacular naming practices, which asks what is at stake when local knowledge, cultural memory and ways of speaking disappear. 

In a time of social, cultural and ecological vulnerability, creative writing may help us cultivate forms of care and listening that acknowledge both the limits of what can be known and our responsibility to what remains.

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Hannah Lowe was born in Essex to an Afro-Chinese father and White English mother. Her father’s death, when she was twenty-two, prompted her to begin writing and led to a wide range of literary investigations into the Chinese presence in the Caribbean, postwar migration to Britain, and of British multiculturalism. She holds an MA in Refugee Studies, and undertook a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Her poetry and non-fiction prose has garnered numerous awards and accolades, including The Costa Book of the Year, The Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. Her work has also featured widely on radio, including Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Free Thinking, and Front Row.

This year, she will host the Glimpse podcast, produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. Her new book The Woman in the Chinese Collar, will be published by Scriber in early 2027.