International Webinar on “Eco-Literature and Pandemic”

Department of English, Faculty of Media Studies and Humanities organized an International Webinar recently. The topic of discussion was Eco-Literature and Pandemic.

Dr Shivani Vashist welcomed the guests and highlighted how COVID-19 Pandemic has changed everyone’s life. She mentioned the new additions of words like ‘Social Distancing and Work From Home’ in Webster’s Dictionary in 2020. She shares that Eco-Literature is the study of Literature and Environment and scholars study literary texts to illustrate environmental concerns.

The first resource person for the webinar was Prof. Carolyn Heising who is a Faculty at the Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department, Iowa State University. She did her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University and has organized and conducted various national and international Webinars and Conferences. She discussed the dangers of COVID-19. According to her, during the times of Covid-19 “the personal has become dangerous”. She talked about the lifestyle changes that will become permanent all over the world after the pandemic is over like the Indian Namaste. She talked about the ecological changes in the environment due to the pandemic. She elaborated on how healthcare professionals will be the new heroes and how new eco-literatures can come out revolving around them. She talked about the American consumerism and how the hyper-individualism idea promoted by Trump was defeated. She speculated that a benefit of the pandemic could be that it might be able to end hyper-individualism. She talked about the American culture’s affinity to consumerism and how destructive it is to the individual as well as the environment. She promoted environmental values and asserted that climate change is a major reason for the pandemic we are facing.

The second speaker of the day was Dr. Ram Sharma, who is an accomplished poet and writer both in English and Hindi. At present, he is working as an Associate Professor and Head of the department of English in J.V.P.G. College. He talked about how hyper-individualism is growing in the world and its negative consequences. He spoke about how humans are the main reason for global warming. He discussed steps to stop global warming like planting trees, stopping deforestation, taking public transport among others. He concluded by saying that if we do not fix the escalating global warming, then the humans will have no future.

The webinar witnessed an immense strength of students and faculty members. The students were enriched by the inputs shared by both the speakers during the session.