African Climate Futures In Conversation

A thought-provoking evening as we delved into the urgent and imaginative terrain of African Climate Futures. This special event celebrated the launch of African Climate Futures, the latest book by Dr Carl Death, which explores how African science fiction is addressing climate change, weighing up climate policies in African countries and discussing the stories and films alongside them. In conversation with Dr Kelechi Anucha and Professor Jade Munslow Ong, Dr Death explored how climate change is being understood, contested and reimagined across the African continent and the power of stories to shape how we think about places, time, ecology and politics and the heroes and villains of climate change. Carl Death is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Carl’s research focuses on environmental politics in Africa, with a particular interest in critical and postcolonial approaches. His latest book, African Climate Futures (OUP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. Dr Kelechi Anucha’s background is in literary studies and the environmental and medical humanities. She has worked collaboratively in cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research teams and as a part of creative projects centred on wellbeing, connection and equality. Her past and current work explores the impact of environmental crises on individual and planetary health, with a focus on how historic and ongoing forms of harm are distributed along racial lines. She is the convenor for Critical Ecologies at University of Manchester, a core module on which introduces students to key concepts from environmental humanities, anchoring their understanding of how the politics of climate crisis are registered across various geographical sites, archives and collections, cultural forms and critical-theoretical interventions. Jade Munslow Ong is Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Salford. She is author of Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (Routledge, 2018), co-author with Matthew Whittle of Global Literature and the Environment (Routledge, 2025), and co-editor with Andrew van der Vlies of Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Jade is currently Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, Decolonising Literary Studies In and Beyond the Classroom, and is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker who appears on programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4. The event took place in the beautiful House of Books and Friends on the 22nd January 2026.