Abstract Writing from Australia, where acute climate crisis intersects with enduring colonial legacies, in this article we present our ongoing investigation into how environmental changes reshape scientific, literary-cultural, and philosophical discourses, while foregrounding the underutilized potential of humanities. We argue that humanities frameworks provide essential tools to address the current climate inaction by deconstructing the foundational discourses of Western culture that reinforce that inaction. Among the interrelated discourses we consider under our model, this article focuses on the relationship between the “invulnerable” body and human and non-human bodies made vulnerable by the power dynamics and material conditions of climate crisis. Through case studies of Noongar artist-writer Claire Coleman’s science fiction novel, Terra Nullius (2017) and Ellen van Neerven’s narrative “Water” (from Heat and Light , 2014), we demonstrate how literary narratives dismantle dominant symbolic regimes to foster more effective engagements with climate crisis. Our analysis ultimately gestures towards the urgent and growing corpus of Australian speculative fiction that explores these critical themes.
Righi et al. (2026) studied this question.