About the author

Dr. April Anson is currently an Assistant Professor of English, affiliate faculty in American studies and Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of Connecticut. Prior to joining UConn, she was Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anson works at the intersection of environmental humanities, Indigenous American studies, and political theory. Specifically, she uses literary analysis to trace the historical and ongoing relationship between climate change, white supremacy, and American environmental thought as well as the Indigenous American environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. Anson is a cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Collective, coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep, and her other research has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and more.

Chapter overview

This chapter describes a module that centers grief and storytelling in imagining climate change. Students practice speculative climate futurism by imagining how an issue they care about reshapes the world of 2050. Course framing and assignments can be adapted to suit upper division majors, general education undergraduate classrooms, or be revised for high school students.

Contact details

April is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can contact her via this email.

April’s personal website: https://april-anson.com/.

Sample of student work

100th Anniversary of the Anthropocene 2050