Saba Pakdel

Topic

Climate Change Migration in Modern and Contemporary British Fiction

Department of English

Date & location

• Monday, June 1, 2026
• 10:00 A.M.
• Hickman Building, Room 110

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Nicholas Bradley, Department of English, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Athena Madan, Department of Sociology, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra, Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Queen’s University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Feng Xu, Department of Political Science, UVic

Abstract

This dissertation highlights overlapping discourses of climate change and migration and traces the emergence of a category of climate migrants in literature. I track an intuitive link between climate change and migration in post-war British fiction and show how migration and pollution (and later fossil fuels) converge from post-World War II to contemporary novels. With an overlap between migration and climate change, each phenomenon becomes a metaphor for the other. The metaphor emerges in how the featured novels think about the relationship between, for instance, Black people and the Smog, coal burning and the Windrush generation of migrants, crude oil trade and anti-Muslim sentiments, to name a few.

The relationship between migration and climate change in this dissertation’s featured novels is not causal. Instead, it is thematic and formal as the two notions converge and imagine a category of climate migrants into existence. Tracing migrants’ relationships with their new home(land) and experience of indeterminacy, of otherness, and of vulnerability, this dissertation concludes by highlighting how migrants are expelled from the political system so the system, fossil economy, and business-as-usual maintain their coherence for as long as the newly arrived person circulates as a threat to the integrity of the system they enter.