Paper short abstract

Digital narratives of climate change denial express a longing for a “natural order,” where humans did not shape the climate yet remained subject to its power. Using Svetlana Boym’s concepts on nostalgia, this paper reflect on how such imaginaries of nature function to structure denialist discourse

Paper long abstract

This paper adress vernacular narratives of climate denial online, focusing on their nostalgic longing for a return to a “natural order.” Within these discourses, climate change is not only rejected through a denounciation of climate research, but reframed as a disruption of a perceived equilibrium in which humans did not shape the climate, and where nature remained an uncontrollable force. To analyze these dynamics, I draw on Svetlana Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia. The narratives mobilize restorative nostalgia to claim the possibility of a return to a time where nature were considered a force distinct from human influence: a solitary power that freed us from any responsibility. Such a position actively nourish the contemporary epistemic crisis, in which expert knowledge is destabilized by appeals to common sense as an everyday rationality. By privileging anecdotal observations and “what everyone knows” over scientific evidence, denialist narratives reinforce an affective economy that delegitimizes scholarship and nurtures broader distrust in democratic institutions. How might we acknowledge the importance of storytelling, and nostalgic longing by offering alternative forms of expressing such sentiments? perhaps relefctive nostalgia might offer a tool in that endeavor.

This paper contributes to environmental humanities and folklore studies by demonstrating how nostalgia for natural changes in nature functions as both an affective resource and a political tool in sustaining denialist discourse in the age of post-truth.

Paper short abstract

I capture the scientific discourse on water as a form of folklore, characterized by its intertwining with local knowledge, and its evolution into narratives of care, resistance and responsiblity in the post-truth era. These narratives influence ecological imagination, solidarity and community action

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how scientific narratives about the protection of water resources function as a form of contemporary folklore—distinct modes of storytelling that, like myths or parables, shape values, mobilize communities, and legitimize claims. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Rogoźno Commune in western Poland, I explore how expert accounts of drought, inland water reclamation, river restoration, biodiversity loss, and hydro-infrastructure circulate, intertwine with local ecological knowledge, and are reinterpreted as “usable narratives” in struggles over water.

In this context, scientific expertise does not merely provide facts; it produces stories. Hydrologists’ reports, activist conferences, and biomonitoring data become tales that, once reframed by local actors, travel alongside rumors of contamination and memories of the past conditions of rivers and lakes. These hybrid narratives illuminate both mechanisms of power—by exposing institutional neglect and infrastructural violence—and practices of care, as they sustain ecological imagination and community solidarity.

By approaching scientific discourse as a narrative genre, I suggest that expertise is best understood not as an authoritative transfer of truth but as a form of storytelling embedded in social life. Like folklore, these stories are repeated, contested, and adapted, revealing their cultural work in moments of environmental conflict.

In the post-truth condition, such “scientific folklore” helps us see how truth claims are negotiated in practice and how narratives—whether expert, local, or more-than-human—become infrastructures of ecological responsibility and fragile hope.

Paper short abstract

The lecture explores how Arabic place names persist in Israel despite Hebraization, revealing tensions between Palestinian memory, the Zionist “empty land” narrative, and Jewish theological claims to the land.

Paper long abstract

Between Linguistic Truth and the Israeli Spatial Imaginary

Arabic Place Names in Israeli Society

Amer Dahamshe

The Zionist project worked to erase every trace of the Palestinians’ expulsion through the destruction of the remains of Arab villages, under the pretext that they marred the character of the new landscape. This destruction was accompanied by the erasure and denial of Palestinian toponymic identity (Benvenisti 2000).

Nevertheless, Israel left markers of Palestinian memory, for example, by assigning Hebrew names to Jewish localities that resemble in sound the names of depopulated Palestinian villages, as well as through the physical remnants of depopulated villages (Hever 2018). Moreover, Israeli society continues to use Palestinian (Arabic) names of depopulated Palestinian villages, displaced neighborhoods, and natural features, even though Hebrew names exist for these sites. Palestinian names even appear on Israeli signposts located in Jewish neighborhoods, local communities, kibbutzim, and natural landscapes under the control and management of Israeli authorities.

In this lecture, I will examine the persistence of Arabic place names in natural features within Israeli society, and on signposts installed in areas where naming falls under the authority of Israeli bodies inside the Green Line. The lecture will focus on the symbolic meaning of these names. My argument is that the remnants of Palestinian names that survived Hebraization reveal a tension between the linguistic-spatial truth and the Zionist-national image of Palestine as an “empty land,” as well as the Jewish theological conception of “To your seed I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7; 15:18; 17:8).

Paper short abstract

Folk stories are rife with narratives of the regenerative powers of trees. So too are IPCC carbon capture narratives. The Anthropocene has proven these narratives to be increasingly naïve, if not detrimental, to facing the necessary challenges of climate apocalypse.

Paper long abstract

The idea that the trees can save us, that is, provide a sound means of carbon capture and storage (on a geoengineering scale) is an alluring promise that resonates among popular audiences and is consistently included as one tool in various global warming mitigation models (i.e., the IPCC). The promise of reforestation is further bolstered by cultural narratives: Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees (1953); the American myth of Johnny Appleseed; the Norse myth of Yggdrasil, the World Tree; and worldwide indigenous traditions harkening back to animist belief systems. At Arizona State University, Professor Klaus Lackner is actively engineering his “mechanical tree”, a metal contraption for filtering CO2 out of the air. I argue that the reality is, by contrast, dark. Lackner’s engineering efforts reveal a perverse technophilic geoengineering ethos. In fact, the promise of engineered reforestation is what Lauren Berlant (Chicago) calls “cruel optimism,” or what Naomi Oreskes (Harvard) calls “Human Adaptive Optimism”—the belief in the power of human ingenuity to save us with some just-in-time technology that does not exist. These narratives of reforestation have lulled us into a false sense of comfort, belying the reality of how limited reforestation really is as a tool for carbon capture, deceiving us into thinking that the solutions to our problems are so simple: plant trees! Plant lots of trees! The trees, however, have promised nothing. Ultimately, this paper turns to Richard Powers’ Overstory as a sobering narrative corrective of our apocalyptic realities, in contrast to our narcissistic carbon confabulations.

Paper short abstract

Narratives often stigmatize disabled people as pitiable or entitled, justifying economic, emotional, and physical violence against us. This paper counters those stories, exploring ones that center on disability as a natural form of being, and arguing the “normal” body is a cultural construct.

Paper long abstract

Narratives often stigmatize people with disabilities, suggesting we deserve pity or are entitled freeloaders who expect to be supported by government funds. In such narratives disability is considered unnatural, abnormal, a defect that suggests moral and physical flaws, pervasive ideas that justify oppressive social and political practices against disabled people. As a result of these beliefs, we often endure economic, emotional, and physical violence and microaggressions due to ableist notions that suggest people with disabilities are somehow lesser than (temporarily) able-bodied people. Further, people with disabilities are assumed to be unhappy with our bodies, since we should clearly desire a “normal” healthy body.

These narratives do not consider that disability is a natural state of being and part of normal human variation, or that we could find joy because of our disabilities as opposed to in spite of them. This critical and creative presentation will explore the concept of disability joy in personal narratives, rethinking ideas of the “natural” body, embodied joy, and what it means to experience nature. While nature and the natural world are often considered inaccessible for people with disabilities, narratives reveal how it may it be a source of disability joy and a way to suggest that body variation is natural while the idea of the “normal” body is a cultural construction.

Paper short abstract

Storytelling and artistic practices anchor education in crises. Our qualitative study confirmed that during COVID-19, they helped youth express, process emotions, and shape identity. As poetic knowledge, stories turn chaos into meaning, nurturing creativity, empathy, and resilience.

Paper long abstract

The paper explores the role of storytelling and artistic practices in education, especially in times of uncertainty and crisis. Stories act as anchors when the world becomes unstable, offering individuals and communities tools to understand experiences, process emotions, and strengthen identity. Within the SKUM project, numerous activities in kindergartens and schools demonstrated that storytelling is not merely a pedagogical method but a fundamental human need.

The importance of narrative proved particularly significant during the COVID-19 pandemic, when storytelling became a therapeutic practice for children and adolescents. By creating and sharing stories—through words, photography, or visual arts—young people expressed their concerns, hopes, and reflections on isolation, loss, and resilience. Narratives transformed moments of disruption into meaningful experiences, enabling self-reflection and mutual empathy.

The paper shows that storytelling teaches and strengthens in multiple ways: it contextualizes historical and cultural knowledge, fosters creativity, and enables critical engagement with reality. It also provides a way to confront personal and collective traumas, in line with Aristotle’s concept of catharsis. Positioning narrative as a first-person experience and a form of poetic knowledge highlights how stories give structure to chaos and create a shared world that can be re-imagined.

Thus, when the world trembles, stories ground us—they connect past and present, self and other, the personal and the communal. In unstable times, they provide stability while fostering creativity and resilience needed to face the challenges of contemporary life.

Paper short abstract

After the 2025 LA Fires, the commodification of personal narratives for insurance claims transformed a natural disaster into a social/political one, complicating personal trauma with the moral injury of state abandonment. The “Smart City” conspiracy offers a vernacular theory of structural violence.

Paper long abstract

In the wake of the devastating LA fires, homeowners are rebuilding one story at a time. Before they can afford to repair and replace their homes and possessions, they must file insurance claims and recount their losses. In written accounts and over recorded phone calls with adjusters, they explain what happened, and their narratives of property damage become data points in obscure and specialized corporate decision-making. This project will draw on qualitative ethnographic research with communities impacted by the Palisades and Eaton fires, comparing personal narratives about the experience of the fires to interactions with insurance companies. What role do the verbal accounts of property damage provided by the insured play in the claims process? How are these texts quantified, what strategies for storytelling are successful, and how do the details preferred by insurance companies compare to the structure of personal narratives told in noninstitutional contexts? Fraught interactions between property owners and insurance companies, and the commodification of personal narratives they necessarily entail, transform a natural disaster into a social and political one. They complicate experiences of personal trauma with the moral injury of abandonment by the state. The viral “Smart City” conspiracy theory, blaming the January 2025 fires on government infrastructure plans for improved technological monitoring of traffic patterns, air quality, and crime in advance of the 2028 Olympic Games, offers a vernacular theory of structural violence: where is the line between a state that cannot help its people, and a state that will actively attack them?

Paper short abstract

This paper explores narratives produced by predominantly online communities calling themselves 'targeted individuals' (TIs). TIs believe themselves to be harassed, surveilled, or attacked by silent, invisible, nefarious forces including defense, security or intelligence agencies or Big Tech.

Paper long abstract

The acceleration of internet and AI technologies worldwide, the militarization of brain sciences, and growing public awareness of histories of covert warfare by the US against its own citizens have led to the emergence of communities--both online and offline--of individuals who describe themselves as 'Targeted Individuals.' Many TIs believe they are the subjects of secret 'deep state' machinations which include experimental CIA torture programs and their illegal placement in the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB). Drawing on ethnographic interviews with one TI organization, Targeted Justice, this paper explores how TI narratives of bodily violation, surveillance, and electronic harassment refract the practices and affects (particularly paranoia) that also characterize practices of psychological warfare (PsyOps) and covert warfare more generally. Rather than create clear dichotomies between 'expert' (rational) and 'lay' (irrational) discourses, I show how these are dialectically related in the context of psychological warfare and targeting. Finally, this paper also grapples with the strange truth that while TIs are often labeled 'conspiratorial,' they also appeal to and aim to reform systems of government and corporate surveillance around which there is broad public agreement.