In the face of accelerating climate change, efforts such as education, protest, and legislation have been pursued, but with limited effect. Although all regions are affected by this trend, Europe is the world's fastest warming continent with an average temperature increase of 2°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures. It is realistic to consider ways in which individuals and society could adapt to living in transformed environments while nevertheless honing efforts to mitigate environmental crises.
Alongside scientific and policy discussions,cultural responses have also emerged. Ecological speculative fiction allows authors to imaginatively test out different transformational coping strategies and readers to speculatively explore what it would be like to live in such a world. Ostensibly about the future, 21st century speculative fiction actually discusses what could be done right now in response to environmental crises. In mediating what possibilities for and limitations of transformation readers perceive, the vocabulary used to describe environmental crises influences how readers respond.
Vocabularies of Environmental Transformation investigates how speculative fiction from diverse cultural contexts imagines responses to environmental crises through culturally specific vocabularies of transformation. By focusing on cross-cultural comparison of the linguistic specifics that authors use to represent environmental crises, the project aims to broaden international cooperative speculation about transformative strategies in the face of climate crisis. By uncovering distinct vocabularies of transformation in a corpus of Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo- American ecological speculative fiction, the project connects culturally specific thematizations of environmental crisis to readers’ imaginative and agential possibilities.
The specific vocabulary used to depict environmental crises and responses to them reflects discrete thematizations of climate change that entail different possibilities for reacting to and interacting with such change. These vocabularies of transformation suggest intriguing similarities and divergences between understandings of climate change in Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo-American speculative fiction. The topic of environmental crisis and climate change is of global importance, and speculative fiction occupies a unique position relative to these problems since authors reflect on current social and cultural issues while imaginatively speculating consequences, solutions, and how situations could be framed differently. By clarifying and disseminating these linguistic strategies for framing and coping with ecological crises, the project will facilitate cross-cultural knowledge sharing and collaboration in addressing environmental and climate challenges through social, cultural, and personal transformations.
Elizabeth Oakes is a post doctoral researcher in stylistics with particular expertise in corpus and computational approaches and ecostylistics. Their MSCA-PF funded project, Vocabularies of Environmental Transformation in Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo-American Speculative Fiction is located at Tallinn University where they work as a Research Fellow. They have published the results of a pilot study for this project in Stylistic Approaches to Global Speculative Fiction: Narratology, Multimodality, and Translation.
Their dissertation, Stay Strange: A Computational Stylistic Analysis of Altered Consciousness in American Science Fiction 1960–1979, which they successfully defended at the University of Helsinki in 2025, used corpus-stylistic methods to identify styles of representing altered consciousness in American science fiction novels from the 1960s and 1970s. They have published on the subject in Poetics of Disturbance: Narratives of Body and Mind, Linguistics Vanguard, and Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, where they served as Editor-in-Chief 2022–2024.
Aside from research, Elizabeth loves psychedelic science fiction, painting (particularly zines), practicing Kashima Shinryu (a 15th century Japanese sword art), hiking and foraging, and their gremlins (one tiny tiger, a miniature jaguar, and a smol bear).