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 any panel proposals below and our Biennial Conference page.
Calls for Proposals
January 31, 2012. “NATURA LOQUENS:” Eruptive Dialogues, Disruptive Discourses. Contributions are invited for the 5th EASLCE International Conference on “Natura Loquens: Eruptive Dialogues, Disruptive Discourses,” to be held in Tenerife, Canaries, SPAIN, 27-30 June 2012. The event is organised on behalf of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) by the University of La Laguna, Faculty of Philology, and the Department of English and German Studies, in the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
There is an ongoing debate nowadays over the agency of Nature and the necessity of reopening the definition of what counts as speech. One would need to differentiate between new insights about animal communication and the idea that non-animal and inanimate nature “signify,” or the suggestion of biosemiotics that life itself is a process of signification. Thus, Nature often presents articulated reactions which can be both eruptive and disruptive. We expect to bring to the arena of this academic meeting, placed at the very foot of Mount Teide (Spain’s highest volcanic peak, with an altitude of 3718 m.), as manifold eruptive dialogues as possible. Attention will focus on the contrasting relationship between Nature and humankind, ever in perpetual and delicate interrelationship since the history of humankind and especially after the emergence of the so-called Anthropocene Era (P. Crutzen). In effect, the ability to speak and communicate made it possible to detach this Homo sapiens genus from other animal species, establishing thus a hierarchy that has been working until present day. Such Aristotelian human “loquacity” is based on a “great chain of being” (A.O. Lovejoy) that places this Homo loquens in a superior position, being able to structure and articulate the universe. If we were able to deconstruct and reverse this idea in order to acknowledge Nature’s ability to speak out (Christopher Manes, David Abrams), then multiple and creative conversations could be established, so as to reconstruct the natural order of things. While environmental concerns grow louder and more frequently today, traditional disruptive discourses that posit the idea of nature as an impediment to human progress do continue to emerge and spread out. The main purpose of this conference is then to reenact, rethink and fluidize the dialogic balance between Nature and human knowledge, engaging in an intellectually fairer and more empathetic communication.
Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 2500 words/20 minutes OR contributions to paper jam sessions 1250 words/12 minutes) and panels (3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are now invited. Topics will include but not be restricted to:
- Ideological, philosophical, political and cultural uses and/or misuses of the concept of Nature as the material reality of the sum of all organic and inorganic phenomena, including human beings.
- Description of Nature’s “agency” in cultural, artistic, literary and filmic representations of the anthropocentric canon in diachronic and synchronic historical periods.
- Dialogues and discourses regarding either subalternity or supremacy of Nature in historical, sociological, economic and artistic documents and other media.
- The interaction of Nature and Humankind in the creation/destruction of the world, as depicted in sci-fi, catastrophe literature, and trans- and post-human utopias/dystopias.
- Lead metaphors and metonymies, and other semantic tropes, structuring our perception and comprehension of the natural world, and the human capacity to transform the environment.
- Material/spiritual approaches to the natural world and their political and ethical contestations.
- The “retaliation” of Nature, especially in the 21st century: climate change, the ozone hole, “nukes” and quakes, eruptive ash clouds and other “apocalyptic” signs.
- The mirage/miracle of Nature: biodiversity & homogenization, global and local phenomena, human-made/destroyed landscapes, eruptions and erosions…
- The seemingly “pathetic fallacy”: Speaking animals, plants or inanimate objects in literature and the arts.
- Theoretical & critical approaches to Nature, and discussion of their frailties and strengths in contemporary debate: postcolonialism, environmentalism, ecological feminism, material ecocriticism, toxicity and discourse, biosemiotics, ecopedagogy, eco-translatology, and others.
The primary conference languages will be English and Spanish, but (following our practice at previous EASLCE conferences) proposals for panels in other European languages are also welcome.
Please submit proposals for panels or individual papers (title plus 250 words), together with a brief bionote (4-5 lines), and complete contact data, to Professor Juan Ignacio Oliva (jioliva@ull.es) by 31 January 2012, indicating your IT requirements.
February 29, 2012. Composting Culture: Literature, Nature, Popular Culture, Science: ASLE-UKI Conference. The UK-Ireland branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment invites proposals for its 2012 biennial conference. The conference will take place between Thursday 6 – Sunday 9 September, 2012 at the University of Worcester, supported by the university’s Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts. Recent work in ecocriticism largely recognises the complexity of ecological science and philosophy and its social and political dimensions. This has resulted in an increased emphasis on paradigms and perspectives that embrace that complexity: posthumanism; biosemiotics; discordance; consilience etc. Consequently, with regard to its objects of study, ecocriticism might increasingly be characterised as a multidisciplinary act of ecological intervention that has fermented an array of possible reference points – globalisation, science, neuroscience, spirituality etc – into an expanding range of cultural texts, stretching far beyond the literary canon of romantic nature writing that shaped ecocriticism in its early years.
This conference will explore the extent to which correspondences between more complex ecological understanding and cultural forms might be evident, most particularly, in non-canonical texts, or previously unexplored linkages between theories and texts, or in the upcycling of established literary or cultural forms, movements, writers etc. Conceptualised by Jed Rasula as a process of composting where ‘interanimating tendencies’ converge into the possible emergence ‘of newness, of the unpredicted’, this ‘nutritive sensibility’ has recently traversed cultural theory and practice: in Harriet Tarlo’s identification of a conjunction between experimental poetics and radical landscape poetry; in the ‘new nature writing’ of ‘Edgelands’ (Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts), or places like Essex, which acknowledges the blurring of human-nonhuman, rural and urban; even in popular culture, for example in a recognition of technology’s perhaps paradoxical ability to inculcate both deep ecological awareness and a scientific sense of nature as process (as aspired to in Bjork’s recent "Biophilia" project).
Keynote speakers will include:
Thierry Bardini, Université de Montréal, author of Junkware, examining ‘junk’ in nature (DNA) and culture (science fiction) alike
Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, author of This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry
Molly Scott-Cato, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, Green Party UK Speaker on Economics, author of Green Economics
Along these lines, we now invite papers and proposals that can offer, most particularly, a focus on hitherto neglected or unexplored interconnections between authors, texts, genres, and cultural forms. These might relate, but are not restricted to, the following themes:
Recycling, composting, fermenting, or junk as cultural tropes
Consilience:* *ecological science and cultural/literary texts
‘New nature writing’
New perspectives on Romanticism
Green media and popular culture
Ecopoetics/landscape poetry
Posthumanism
Postcolonialism or globalisation
Biosemiotics and Zoosemiotics
Biotechnology and ecotechnology
Ecological discordance or complexity
‘Edgelands’
The canon and ideas of cultural value etc
Rhetoric, metaphor or narrative
Environmental (in)justice
Nature, post-nature, ‘second nature’
Toxicity
‘Social Ecologies of the Imagination’
Individual papers should be 20 minutes. Please send a title and 250 word abstract to David Arnold: d.arnold@worc.ac.uk and John Parham j.parham@worc.ac.uk by the deadline, Wednesday 29 February 2012. Further details – including registration costs and accommodation – will be circulated in the Spring. Our intention is to offer video conferencing, allowing for the participation of international delegates unable or reluctant to travel.
March 15, 2012. Native American Literature and Environmental Justice, joint session at the 2013 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, Boston, 3–6 January 2013. Co-sponsored by Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL) and ASLE. We explore the distinct epistemological framework of indigenous knowledges, asking how literature destabilizes dominant discourses and opens modes of politics to address environmental (in)justices.
Submission requirements: 2 page abstract
Deadline for submissions: 15 March 2012
Contacts: Jan Johnson (janjohn@uidaho.edu) and Janet Fiskio (jfiskio@oberlin.edu).
March 31, 2012. SHARP EYES VII: IS NATURE WRITING DEAD? AN ASLE-AFFILIATED CONFERENCE. June 4-7, 2012, State University of New York College at Oneonta. This conference will be the seventh in the John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference & Seminar series. The theme of this year’s conference was inspired by a statement offered at an Earth Day event at Middlebury College in 2010 honoring John Elder, where an editor from Orion Magazine declared that “Nature Writing is dead.” The obvious rejoinder to such a declaration is “what do you mean by ‘nature writing’?” The 2012 conference will address this issue, and invites papers dealing with writers of natural history such as Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, and other nineteenth-century authors through the more politically-charged writing of modern writers. We also welcome papers that deal with permutations of “nature writing” that go beyond the natural history essay, including green (and blue) works in the genres of film, fiction, and poetry. As always, papers on any aspect of John Burroughs’s life and work are also encouraged. Papers are delivered to plenary sessions of students, faculty, and visiting scholars. Conference field trips will include a visit to John Burroughs’s Woodchuck Lodge in Roxbury, New York, which is within walking distance of his burial site. Graduate or undergraduate credit is available through SUNY College at Oneonta. Send abstracts or proposals by March 31, 2012, 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 6, 2012. Environmental Science Fiction and the Non-Urban Scape, ASLE-sponsored panel at the 2012 Science Fiction Research Association Conference: Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Landscapes in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Detroit, MI, June 28-July 1, 2012.
Ecocritic Patrick D. Murphy notes, "The idea of the land as scape establishes place, whether woods or lake or mountain range, as something separate from human culture" (Farther Afield 13). Proposals are invited that explore how science fiction has addressed this land-as-scape problematic. Has science fiction largely supported a conception of the non-urban ("land," "place," "nature," etc.) as escape from culture? If so, what texts maintain the land/culture divide? Or, has science fiction done much to challenge this divide with an understanding of nature as something we are always in-as something we cannot escape? What science fiction works maintain this more complex view of land and culture, and what do these works contribute to recent efforts to upset conventional notions about "nature" (e.g., Timothy Morton, Slavoj Zizek)?
This panel is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), a professional affiliate organization of SFRA. Please submit a 200-word proposal in the body of an email to Eric Otto at eotto@fgcu.edu by Friday, April 6th, 2012. See http://sfradetroit2012.com/ for more information about the conference.