Special Session

Ecocriticism and Science / Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict

Ananya Roy (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
a.ro@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This session examines how global climate fiction reimagines ruling classes under conditions of ecological crisis. Moving beyond traditional political hierarchies, it explores how power is redistributed through control over resources, technology, and environmental survival. Works such as Snowpiercer, Okja, and The Memory Police depict emergent elites—corporate, technocratic, and state actors—who govern through systems of extraction, containment, and disposability. The session invites papers that interrogate how climate narratives stage conflicts between dominant regimes and resistant communities, rethinking sovereignty, leadership, and collective survival in an era of environmental breakdown. This panel brings climate fiction into direct dialogue with PAMLA’s focus on ruling classes by examining how ecological crisis produces new forms of authority and resistance.

This session invites papers that examine how contemporary climate fiction (cli-fi) reimagines ruling classes, leadership, and social hierarchy under conditions of ecological crisis. In line with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the panel explores how environmental breakdown reshapes the distribution of power, producing new elites and intensifying conflicts over authority, survival, and governance.

Rather than focusing solely on atmospheric change, this session foregrounds material ecologies of crisis—extraction, waste, resource scarcity, and technological control—as key sites through which power is exercised and contested. Texts and films such as Snowpiercer, Okja, The Memory Police, and The Three-Body Problem illustrate how speculative and realist narratives imagine emergent ruling classes—corporate regimes, technocratic institutions, and authoritarian states—that govern through the control of bodies, environments, and futures.

The session is particularly interested in how climate fiction stages struggles against these regimes. How do marginalized communities resist systems of extraction and containment? In what ways do narratives of ecological crisis challenge inherited forms of authority, from state sovereignty to corporate governance? How are leadership and legitimacy redefined when survival itself becomes unevenly distributed?

We also welcome approaches that consider more-than-human dimensions of power, including multispecies relations, oceanic and littoral ecologies, and environments that resist or exceed human control. Papers may engage literary texts, film, and media, drawing on environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, and environmental justice frameworks.

Possible topics include (but not limited to):

-Corporate and technocratic ruling classes in climate futures
- Resource control and environmental governance
- Extraction, waste, and ecological disposability
- Revolutionary or insurgent responses to ecological regimes
- Climate authoritarianism and crisis governance
- Posthuman and multispecies challenges to human authority
- Indigenous and decolonial critiques of sovereignty
- Oceanic and coastal struggles over territory and survival