Professors Alison Vogelaar, Brack Hale, and Alexandra Peat publish timely volume, The Discourses of Environmental Collapse: Imagining the End
This interdisciplinary volume illustrates the collaborative potential of Franklin University Switzerland. It was co-edited by Franklin professors from three fields of study, Alison Vogelaar in Communication and Media Studies, Brack Hale in Environmental Science and Studies, and Alexandra Peat in Literature. It also features a chapter by professor Ann Gardiner, and its production was supported by student intern Madeline Ames '18. The topics covered in this ten-chapter volume will be familiar to many Franklin students who have studied in Professors Vogelaar, Hale, and Peat's courses as well as to participants of the 2015 workshop, "Environmental Justice, 'Collapse,' and Question of Evidence," where the ideas for this book first surfaced.
Structured in three sections, "Doc-Collapse," "Pop Collapse" and "Craft Collapse," the volume explores the rich and varied discourses of environmental collapse. Confronted with mounting evidence of environmental crises such as climate change and large-scale species extinction, the concerns about whether we can sustain life on our planet have become formulated as issues of collapse. Bringing together diverse fields of inquiry and a rich array of texts, this volume surveys and critically explores the implications of collapse discourses for solving urgent and imminent environmental crises and, as Brendon Larson at the University of Waterloo writes, "offers a series of hopeful meditations on whether collapse is really so imminent and frightening or so unitary and permanent."