project fund – Speculative Climates: Hauntings of the Past Across the Humanities
International Doctoral Workshop for Early Career Researchers
19-20 November 2026
Universität zu Köln
Considering the contemporary as a timespace haunted by crises rooted in the past, the workshop Speculative Climates: Hauntings of the Past Across Humanities asks how the intricate mesh of colonialism, (neo)capitalism, and the climate crisis is imagined in the Humanities through Gothic hauntings. These hauntings, we argue, not only negotiate our past and help us reflect on the present, but also open up ways of envisioning more equitable and sustainable futures. Thinking (neo)colonialism and climate crisis together, the workshop builds on arguments by Donna Haraway and postcolonial ecofeminists such as Kathryn Yusoff. While Haraway’s Capitalocene links capitalism and climate crisis, Yusoff argues for the Anthropocene as an ideological concept of White Geology that tries to overshadow how “the inhuman objectification of indigenous and black subjects” (45) preconditions every origin story of the Anthropocene. As Yusoff investigates how slavery drove the coal-mining economy that would ultimately enable the steam engines during Industrialization (which in turn not only enabled capitalist growth, but also caused the contemporary climate crisis), colonial violence is placed at the heart of the Anthropocene, while the causality between (colonial) capitalism and climate change gains centre stage.
As the marginalized and non-normative become the ghosts that haunt our present – ghosts with many forms and shapes – we ask:
- To what extent do cultural products address the link between (neo)colonialism and the climate crisis through Gothic hauntings? What other violence comes to the fore as their material expression haunts our present?
- How are Gothic hauntings employed in speculative climate-imaginaries to transgress normative understandings of time and space, as well as to question heteropatriarchal binaries and the socio-political status quo?
- What dystopian and utopian visions of the future are engendered as Gothic hauntings are imagined within contexts of climate-related, trans-generational trauma and queer futurity? And to what extent can speculative negotiations of the present thus serve as warning signals, creative instruments of hope or resilience, or outlets of reckoning?
Addressing colonial violence and climate crisis together, and arguing for the particular potential of Gothic hauntings as a mechanism to negotiate how the past spills over into the present, the workshop Speculative Climates: Hauntings of the Past Across the Humanities aims to provide a space for Early Career Researchers and Graduate Students to discuss this violent mesh of crises as the participants consider the link between past violence and the climate crisis in speculative arts and non-fiction.
The workshop takes place on November 19 and 20, 2026 at the Erich Auerbach Library (Wienand Haus, Back Building, 3rd Floor, Weyertal 59, 50937 Cologne) and is open to the public.
To register for the event, please send an email to Gianluca Calio (calio[at]em.unifrankfurt.de) and Aylin Walder (aylin-dilek.walder[at]tu-braunschweig.de) with the subject line “Workshop Registration” by October 31, 2026.
The final program is currently being developed and will be shared as soon as possible.