NEWS Young adult fiction that conveys climate and environmental messages can make young people more aware of the climate crisis by portraying a main character with whom the reader identifies. Irene Bordignon, visiting doctoral student at the Department of Language Studies, is interested in sustainable development and climate change with a particular focus on the Arctic.
Irene Bordignon, guest doctoral student
ImageSandra Lundström“My research focuses on studying how speculative fiction can play a crucial role in raising awareness of the climate crisis. My main interests are contemporary young adult literature and ecocriticism, especially in relation to the posthuman and cognitive dimension.”
Irene has an educational background in Scandinavian languages and literature from Italy. She says she came to Umeå University because there is a lot of expertise in her field here.
"The Department of Language Studies is a dynamic and multidisciplinary environment, thus combining the excellence of quality education in the topics I'm particularly interested in, with the opportunity of creating a team network focusing on sharing knowledge among other doctoral students and professors."
She is currently exploring the ways in which ice-texts and Arctic related narrations help (re-)shape young adult minds towards more sustainable approaches, by also taking into consideration advantages and/or disadvantages of the peculiar liminality phase in which the coming-of-age process takes place in these narratives.
“One of my aims is to consider the potential of ice-texts for ecocritical readings: they indeed produce critical nature relations and allow us to re-evaluate human-nature-connections.”