ASLE Affiliated Conferences
We will post here any calls for papers or information on conferences related to ASLE and affiliated organizations, including international groups, ASLE-sponsored panels at other conferences, and ASLE-sponsored off-year symposia. For information on submitting a paper to the ASLE Conference in 2011, please see our Biennial Conference page.
Calls for Proposals
March 2, 2010. Ethical Imperatives: The Praxis of Environment and Literature Curriculum in the 21st Century, ASLE-sponsored panel at the Modern Language Association annual convention, Jan. 6-9, 2011.
contact: Rebecca Jaroff, rjaroff@ursinus.edu
CFP categories: American, Cultural Studies and Historical Approaches, Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies, Eighteenth Century, General Announcements, Medieval, Poetry, Popular Culture, Theory, Twentieth Century and Beyond, Victorian
The following panel is being co-sponsored by the College English Association and ASLE. In his Foreword to the recent MLA publication Teaching North American Environmental Literature (2008), John Tallmadge recognizes that the study and teaching of “environmental literature is still an emerging field” open to almost every genre and period when analyzing texts. Lawrence Buell believes that the environment should be “seen as indispensible to how one reads literature—whether the specific project be the environmental literacy of a text, its way of situating itself locally and/or globally, its attention or inattention to the non-human sphere, or its ideological valence(s) with regard to receptivity or opacity to social justice issues” (The Future of Environmental Criticism, 2005). Still, many questions and concerns arise when considering the ecocritical context of a literary text. In light of the growing number of environment and literature classes being offered at colleges and universities in the U.S., what does it mean to “teach the environment?” How do we connect the figurative world within the text to the literal world we actually occupy? How can we reconcile the mind/body/nature/culture split more effectively? What types of theoretical approaches work/do not work? This panel will consider the ethical imperative to raise environmental issues in today’s classrooms as well as the variety of ways in which those issues can be taught through literature. Paper proposals should explore representations of nature and environments (natural and built) through texts from any period, with a special focus on pedagogical strategies that engage students in relating those representations to current ecocritical and environmental concerns.
Submit 1-2 page abstracts and brief CV to rjaroff@ursinus.edu
Deadline for submissions: 2 March 2010
March 12, 2010. Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action: The Third Annual Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College, an ASLE-Affiliated Conference. June 17-20, 2010, Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT.
Are there limits to local thinking? What is the relationship between rural and local? What is the role of local knowledge in an age of globalization? How are rural regions across the world implicated in global issues?
Panel, workshop, presentation, and roundtable proposals are solicited for Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action from June 17th-20th at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Part of Sterling’'s annual Rural Heritage Institute, this event will explore the developing dialogue between local and global concerns as it applies to economy, agriculture, history, food, culture, and rural identity.
Located at the heart of Vermont'’s Northeast Kingdom, Is Local Enough? capitalizes on the model of community and experiential learning at the center of the Sterling College curriculum and apparent throughout the surrounding communities.
Each year, The Rural Heritage Institute draws participants who are passionate about solidifying the connections among community, academic scholarship, and meaningful action in the field. The intimate atmosphere of the Institute (between 50-75 participants) enables productive conversations among a broad range of practitioners, scholars, community members, and under/graduate students who share an interest in exploring the intersections of local, regional, and global issues – particularly as manifested in the rural Northeast.
Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action will be filled with four days of workshops, field sessions, seminar panels, roundtables, presentations, featured speakers, and hands-on experiences.
You are invited to submit proposals for this immersive and interdisciplinary Institute in areas including (but not limited to):
Bioregionalism, Local Action, Sustainable Agriculture, Glocalism, Farmstead and Folk Arts, Traditional Foodways, The Rural Artisan, The Northern Forest, Globalization, Regional Identity, Rural Literature, Mapping Place, Oral History and Community Memory, Local and Regional Economies, New Economy Agriculture, Radical Consumption, Slow Food, Gender and Rural Identity
Agrarianism, Cottage Industries, The Rhetoric of Place, Community-Based Food Systems, Rural Ethnic Traditions, Sense of Place
Please send one-page proposals to Pavel Cenkl at ruralheritage@sterlingcollege.edu by March 12, 2010.
March 31, 2010. SHARP EYES VI: OLD LESSONS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM: NATURE WRITING AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY. An ASLE-Affiliated Conference, June 7-11, 2010, the State University of New York at Oneonta.
This event will be the sixth in the John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference & Seminar series. The 2010 conference will focus on the work of writers who contributed to the early conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, and the work of contemporary writers who are exerting an influence on the development of early twenty-first century environmentalism. Papers are delivered to plenary sessions of students, faculty, and visiting scholars. During the conference, a field trip to John Burroughs’s Woodchuck Lodge in Roxbury, New York (which is within walking distance of his burial site) will be scheduled. There will be an additional trip scheduled to the site of the old Catskill Mountain House, which offers a panoramic view of the Hudson River, and to the beautiful Kaaterskill Falls. Graduate or undergraduate credit is available through SUNY College at Oneonta.
Suggested topics include the influence of nature writers on the early conservation movement; the conflict between the preservationist and “wise use” wings of the conservation movement; the environmental legacy of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot; the influence of modern writers (including, but not limited to writers such as Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, Rick Bass, Barry Lopez, and Terry Tempest Williams) on the current environmental debate; “deep” versus “shallow” ecology; nature writing in times of environmental crises (such as nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, global climate change); the “sense of wonder” and environmental writing for children; and questions relating to sustainability and the development of a green society. As always, papers on any aspect of John Burroughs’s life and work are also encouraged.
Send abstracts or proposals by March 31, 2010, to
Daniel G. Payne, Department of English
SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, NY 13820
E-mail submissions should be sent as an MS Word attachment to paynedg@oneonta.edu
http://www.oneonta.edu/academics/english/conferences/johnburroughs.html
April 4, 2010. Call for Proposals for a special session on Ecocriticism at the
PAMLA Conference. This panel is co-sponsored by ASLE and PAMLA. November 13-14, 2010, Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai.
Proposals are sought for a special session investigating any aspect of ecocriticism, including (but not limited to) ecocritical theory, environmental ethics, environmental justice, colonial and postcolonial ecologies, gender and ecology, literary representations of non-human being, and interdisciplinary investigations of literature and environmental science.
To access the online CFP, please visit http://www.pamla.org/2010/sessions/ecocriticism. Paper proposals of 500 words and a 40-word abstract, due by April 4, 2010 must be submitted via PAMLA's (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) Online Proposal Submission Form, which is available at http://www.pamla.org/2010/session-topics. Session Chair is Kevin Hutchings, hutchink@unbc.ca.
May 1, 2010. ASLE-Sponsored Panel at SAMLA 2010: Ecocriticism and the Virtues of Limit. South Atlantic Modern Language Convention, November 5-7, 2010, Atlanta, GA.
In his recent Harper’s essay “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath no Limits” (2009) Wendell Berry argues that in order to recover from our
"disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover “the secret of the universe.” We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given."
Berry is not the only recent voice to question our fantasies of limitlessness. Another is Berry’s long-time collaborator Wes Jackson, co-editor (with Bill Vitek) of the recent (2009) anthology The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge. This book makes a compelling case for an ignorance-based approach to the world. None of the contributors – one of whom is Berry -- is critical of knowledge per se, but each shows that our knowledge is dwarfed by our ignorance, and that a proper humility is called for. They also demonstrate that, paradoxically, a willingness to admit our ignorance often leads to the greatest advances in knowledge.
This panel will explore the virtues of limits, not only in terms of knowledge, but also regarding space, time, and other fundamentals. What sort of limits obtain in literary texts – epistemological, geographical, religious, social? What are the virtues of limits? How might an acceptance of limits lead to greater insight?
Possible topics include:
* Scientific hubris and alternatives, such as Goethe’s call for a “delicate empiricism”;
* Narratives of sustainability;
* Environmental justice;
* Limitation as a theme in poetry or fiction;
* Limits and literary form;
* Technology and fantasies of limitlessness.
Send abstracts of 250-300 words to Dr. Timothy J. Burbery, Burbery@marshall.edu, by May 1, 2010.
September 19, 2010. Gardens (joint session sponsored by the SEA and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). The Society of Early Americanists’ Seventh Biennial Conference, 3-5 March 2011, Philadelphia.
Panel Chair Name: Thomas Hallock
Affiliation: University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Email contact: thallock@mail.usf.edu
Early Americanist scholarship on literature and the environment has typically focused upon exchanges across vast space: explorations of unfamiliar territories, trans-Atlantic networks, the kind of imperial imaginings that Mary Louise Pratt defined as "global consciousness." How did the smaller space of a garden serve as a setting for new identities and/or forms of sociability? What possibilities for friendship, affection and affiliation did maintaining a garden – whether for work and leisure – open? How do we unpack the human relationships that were transacted within a commercial, ornamental, or kitchen garden?