‘Who's going to look after the river?’: Water and the Ethics of Care in Thomas King's The Back of the Turtle

This paper analyses the trope of water in Thomas King’s latest novel The Back of the Turtle from an ethics-of-care perspective that puts in conversation Indigenous ethics, feminist care ethics and environmental ethics. I suggest that King’s focus on water offers a harsh—even if often humorous—critique of the anthropocentric, neoliberal extractivist mentality while proposing a transcultural ethics of care. Consequently, my analysis of the novel draws on the dialogue taking place in the realm of the Environmental Humanities in Canada and beyond about the centrality of water (See Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimais’ Thinking with Water; Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s Downstream: Reimagining Water; Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology; Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, as well as on Indigenous epistemologies that eschew anthropocentrism in favour of attentive caring for the interconnected needs of humans and non-humans within interdependent ecologies, and feminist environmental care ethics that emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the ecologies that sustain them.Narratives of Resilience: An Intersectional Approach to Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations. FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R. MINECO, Programa Estatal de I+D+i Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad. IP: Ana Mª Fraile

Precarity and the stories we tell: Post-truth discourse and Indigenous epistemologies in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

This article stems from the assumption that the stories emerging from distinct cultural traditions constitute discrete epistemologies that determine how human individuals and societies face ontological vulnerability and precariousness. Focusing on Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), it examines the differential agency of two interlocking sets of stories and their respective epistemological systems. Consequently, the article is divided in two main parts. The first examines the novel’s rendering of the tensions between the Enlightenment’s investment in the search for empirical truth, and its current alignment with unfettered neoliberal capitalism and post-truth discourse. The second part reads the novel’s use of ancestral Indigenous stories as a counterpoint to the stories of modern progress underlying western epistemologies. The emerging question is whether Indigenous ways of knowing embedded in ancestral stories may potentially show the way toward an “ecology of knowledges” that lessens precarity and works toward ecological sustainability.Narrating Resilience, Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology. PID2020-113190GB-C22. MICINN

Free Will, Moral Blindness and Affective Resilience in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

This chapter suggests that Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel The Heart Goes Last reflects on the possibilities and limitations of affect to elicit resilience and positive social change. I posit that resilience—understood broadly as either the capacity of beings and systems to withstand adversity and endure by absorbing shocks and adapting to conditions of crisis, or as “the process of harnessing biological, psychosocial, structural and cultural resources to sustain wellbeing” (Panter-Brick and Leckman 335; emphasis mine)—emerges in Atwood’s novel as a new affect linked to anxiety and emphasizing the tensions between agency, free will, and moral blindness. The article draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s and Hannah Arendt’s philosophical analyses of the contemporary moment, and tracks the novel’s critique of the cold sensitivity underpinning resilience strategies in times of the crises inherent to the period of late modernity.Narrating Resilience, Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology. PID2020-113190GB-C22. MICINN

Resilient Stereotypes in Recent Crisis Novels from Spain

After the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2008, the hegemony of the politics of financial debt was largely perceived in Southern Europe as an internal colonisation, with Germany as the leading economic power. According to this view, Southern Europe became the trial ground for neoliberal late capitalism. The unequal impact of the crisis on the different European economies resulted in the unwelcome reactivation of old stereotypes that hinder the European process towards transnational economic, social and cultural convergence. This contribution considers fiction as a privileged space for the nuanced representation of the complexities characterising the current moment of European liquid modernity and presents the novel as an important arena for critical reflection. It discusses a selection of recently published novels from Spain, which, set in the aftermath of the construction boom and the unveiling of systemic corruption, register the multiple negative consequences of the European austerity policies and grapple with the resurfacing of the stereotypical constructs of national identities through humour, satire, and social and political critique. Among the authors considered are Almudena Grandes, Germán Gullón, Rafael Chirbes, Luis García Jambrina, and Belén Gopegui.Narrating Resilience, Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology. PID2020-113190GB-C22. MICINN

Glocal Narratives of Resilience

Resilience discourse has recently become a global phenomenon, infiltrating the natural and social sciences, but has rarely been undertaken as an important object of study within the field of the humanities. Understanding narrative in its broad sense as the representation in art of an event or story, Glocal Narratives of Resilience investigates the contemporary approaches to resilience through the analyses of cultural narratives that engage aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping the notion of resilience, going beyond the scales of the personal and the local to consider the entanglement of the regional, national and global aspects embedded in the production of crises and the resulting call for resilience. After an introductory survey of the state of the art in resilience thinking, the book grounds its analyses of a wide range of narratives from the American continent, Europe, and India in various theoretical strands, spanning Psycho-social Resilience, Socio-Ecological Resilience, Subaltern Resilience, Indigenous survivance and resurgence, Neoliberal Resilience, and Compromised Resilience thinking, among others, thus opening the path toward the articulation of a cultural narratology of resilience.Narrating Resilience, Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology. PID2020-113190GB-C22. MICINN

‘El desafío del corazón y la imaginación’: en conversación con Lawrence Hill

IntertviewEntrevist

The Role of Weather Types in Assessing the Rainfall Key Factors for Erosion in Two Different Climatic Regions

P. 1-15This paper compares two different geographical sites, Aveiro and León, from different climatic regions, oceanic and continental, but which share the same type of weather (according to Lamb’s classification). The analysis was carried out over one year, and has revealed that rainfall in Aveiro is heavier and more abundant, with a higher number of raindrops and a longer duration of rain events (on average, 10 min longer than in Leon). Mean raindrop size is 0.45 mm in Aveiro and slightly smaller (0.37 mm) in Leon; in addition, the kinetic energy and linear momentum values in Aveiro are three times higher than those in Leon. A comparison of raindrop size distributions by weather type has shown that for both locations westerly weather presented a higher probability of rainfall, and the gamma distribution parameters for each weather type were independent of the study zone. When the analysis is done for the characteristics of rain related with erosion, the westerly cyclonic weather types (cyclonic west (CW) and cyclonic south-westerly (CSW)) are among the most energetic ones in both locations. However, comparing their five weather types with higher kinetic energy, in Aveiro a westerly component implies higher kinetic energy, while in Leon a southerly component involves more energy in the rain.S

Planificación de un Proyecto Piloto de Aprendizaje y Servicio en el ámbito de los Estudios Ingleses

Memoria ID2022-022. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2022-2023

Reajuste en la identificación y evaluación de los niveles de lengua inglesa en el Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Memoria ID-0022. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2017-2018

Assessment of Cultural and Ethical Attitudes in Oral and Writing Assignments

Memoria ID-019. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2018-2019