Through foregrounding environmental humanities, this panel explores how narrative, pedagogy, theology, and Indigenous media open up alternative ways of imagining ecological futures beyond dominant techno-optimist or dystopian frameworks. Across literary, educational, theological, and cinematic approaches, the papers examine how environmental crises can be re-narrated as sites of relational possibility and ethical responsibility. From submerged urban imaginaries in contemporary climate fiction, to pedagogical experiments inspired by Donna Haraway, the panel highlights storytelling as a means of cultivating ecological imagination and agency. It further develops decolonial and relational ecofeminist theology through Asian American frameworks of care and interdependence, and extends these insights through Indigenous cinematic practice in Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes), which foregrounds multispecies kinship and sacred land-based futurity. Together, these contributions emphasize that ecological futures are not singular or predetermined, but are actively shaped through practices of imagination, care, and situated forms of ecological knowledge.
Speaking of “futures” instead of “the future” foregrounds the fact that no singular future is guaranteed. In recent storytelling, two futures are particularly common: the techno-optimist, which envisions the triumph of capitalist innovation, and the climate dystopian, which envisions the inability of capitalism to contain its ecologically destructive powers. Both futures extrapolate features of the current “business-as-usual” order to one or another logical conclusion. This paper explores an alternative narrative found in several recent novels. These novels, including Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World (2025), Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (2025), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), are set in cities that are now at least partially submerged by rising seas. While the waters wash away much of what the cities have been, they also make new forms of life possible. This paper explores the way these novels thematize water – and, with it, the uncontrollable power of a changing climate – as both destructive and potentially liberative.
This paper presents climate fiction as an essential pedagogical tool for envisioning more sustainable and just ecological futures, drawing upon the “The Camille Stories” by Donna J. Haraway as one example (2016). Haraway’s fiction depicts human and more-than-human ongoingness in the face of destruction and despair – challenging readers to resist nihilism and build resilient communities even without the guarantee of success. Beyond analyzing the theory and method of climate fiction, this paper focuses on the benefits of asking students to write their own fictional pieces. Fiction writing challenges students to envision the futures they actually want to sustain: the people, places, and values that are worth their collective effort to protect. Writing fiction also allows students to productively grapple with the possibilities and limits of their own ecological agency. This paper will conclude with practical activities and writing prompts that instructors can integrate within their own courses.
This project (re)imagines Asian American ecofeminist theology through planetary entanglements, offering a decolonizing, relational, and future-oriented response to ecological collapse, climate crisis, and pandemic precarity. Drawing on Judith Butler’s phenomenology of vulnerability and Catherine Keller’s panentheistic ecotheology, it situates ethical and theological reflection within the interdependence of human and more-than-human life. Central to both method and message are two Korean concepts: salim (살림), “enlivening” or "sustaining life", and jeong (정), "relational affectivity and "care". These concepts function as metaphor and ethical lens, showing how contextual, everyday ecofeminist practices—acts of care, repair, and co-flourishing—embody hope for planetary futures while enacting a decolonizing ethic that resists hierarchical and instrumental logics. Salim and jeong provide frameworks for (re)imagining ecological and social interdependence, situating hope as one of many therapeutic-paths within broader ecotheology. The study advances a decolonial theology of Hope, envisioning a new Earth/us co-created through care, relational integrity, and transformative planetary engagement.
My paper examines how Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)—Amanda Strong’s stop-motion film—visualizes sacred landscapes and Indigenous futures through its portrayal of Biidaaban, Sabe, ancestors, and multispecies kin reclaiming maple-sugaring practices within a suburban neighborhood. Drawing on Indigenous visual sovereignty, sensory film analysis, and decolonial theories of land-relation in dialogue with religion and ecology, the paper reflects on the film’s textures, contrasts of light, and spatial layering to show how cinematic form becomes a mode of ceremony and ecological imagination. Strong’s film reveals a sacred geography that persists against erasure, rendering land not as backdrop but as a living network of ancestral presence and multispecies relationality. Its aesthetic strategies display the interweaving of past and present and how future sacred geographies emerge through acts of care and multispecies belonging. Ultimately, this paper interprets Biidaaban as a visual, ceremonial practice of ecological homemaking—an Indigenous futurity that refuses erasure.