Heather Houser: Rethinking Reproduction in Climate Crisis

Does climate crisis require a rethinking of fertility and family? This question motivates my book-in-progress, Our Bodies, Our Climate, and while the simple answer is emphatically "yes," what that "yes" means varies greatly depending on its source. Answering this question activates tensions between scarcity and abundance, certainty and wondering, choice and control, individualism and collectivity, and freedom and restriction, among others, and it enlists a host of perspectives. The book examines these tensions from perspectives including "childfree for climate" advocates, reproductive justice feminists, entrepreneurial pro-birthers, and family abolitionists. This talk takes up some of these tensions and perspectives and engages popular and expert voices as well cultural works from the 2000s at the nexus of reproduction and climate change.
About the Speakers:
Heather Houser is Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin and is studying public health as a Mellon New Directions Fellow through August 2024. Her books are Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014), and her articles on the environment, science, and 21st-century U.S. culture have appeared in a variety of academic and public venues. She is a co-founder of the Planet Texas 2050 climate grand challenge at UT Austin and has worked on climate policy with the City of Austin.
Sarah Dimick is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the English Department at Harvard University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.
About the Series:
The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University and Sarah Dimick, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.