Report from ASLEC-ANZ

By Tom Bristow, President, Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture – Australia New Zealand

Hello to all our friends in ASLE-US!

At ASLEC-ANZ we are very busy organizing our 5th biennial conference, “Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions,” to be held at the Australian National University, Canberra, June 19-21. We’re aiming to bring ecocriticism into conversation with (a) environmental humanities; (b) critical animal studies; (c) critical plant studies; and (d) a history of emotions. We have a great range of keynote speakers, including Ariel Salleh, Elspeth Probyn, Deborah Bird Rose, Linda Williams, Kate Rigby, Freya Mathews, Philip Armstrong, Iain McCalman, John Plotz, Will Steffen, and many other internationally renowned scholars.

My role as ASLEC-ANZ President over the last two years has been twofold–to develop connections with research groups in the academy, and to help establish Australian and New Zealand Connections–and I’m very pleased to be in contact with North American ASLE members. My interest in ASLE began in 2005 when I attended the ASLE conference in Eugene, Oregon, an experience that changed my PhD and triggered a fruitful and enjoyable relationship with the ASLE family in Europe and Australia. Long may that continue. In that vein, ASLEC-ANZ members are frequently exploring the ASLE-US website and discussion forum, thinking about creative ways to develop our connections (for instance, by attending the biennial ASLE-US conferences). I, for one, will be with you for the 2015 ASLE Conference in Idaho. Also, for our Annual General Meeting this year, I’ve ensured the participation of ASLE leaders as well as past-Presidents from Australia, Canada and the UK. This is going to be a lot of fun as we think about where we sit in an international context. Our postgrads are also discussing a potential videoconference event with the ASLE-UKI biennial conference to be held in Dublin this July. We are open to exchanges and conversations with you. Please email me if you’d like to get involved with ASLEC-ANZ: tom.bristow@une.edu.au.

We’re in the process of launching a new website, with Facebook group, Twitter account and weblog. Please do take a look at these and contribute at your leisure: http://aslecanz.wordpress.com/ ASLEC-ANZ postgrad facebook page: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/458714104202423/> postgrad blog Eco-Critical Connections: <http://ecocriticalconnections.wordpress.com/> Twitter feed <https://twitter.com/EcoCritConnect>, <http://ecocriticalconnections.wordpress.com/about/>.

Our association also has a peer-reviewed journal: the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (AJE) . Our third issue has just gone live, and is freely accessible on the internet: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-anz. AJE is new; however, with very little marketing (i.e. none!) we have delivered 15,000 downloads of scholarly articles. I feel that we’ve made an initial impact on the scene, and I know that the editorial team would like to do much more. The Academy in Australia The University of Queensland hosted two notable events last year. The first was the high-powered conference “The Question of Nature” held by the Australian Academy of Humanities, and convened by Professors Gay Hawkins and Peter Harrison. With the ecological crisis in mind, there seemed to be two points that were stressed more than any others: first, how the humanities has really risen to the occasion and taken on some very difficult questions, and second, the importance of clarifying what is distinctive about contemporary humanities, how it is progressing and rethinking connections and overlaps with the social sciences and material cultures. Abstracts and biographical notes can be found here:  http://www.humanities.org.au/Events/PreviousSymposia/2013.aspx

The second conference, organized by Grace Moore, was scintillating as well: firemen and firewomen, academics, activists, environmental policy makers; people affected by Australian fires; poets–all came together to discuss ‘fire’ in theory and in practice, in our imaginations, and in our lives.

A great example of how far the academy has come, and how we are embracing the environmental challenges with verve, passion and integrity was the University of Sydney conference “Encountering the Anthropocene.” This conference clarified the role of the environmental humanities and social sciences by drawing from a range of scholars who looked into three areas: “Perspectives of the Anthropocene,” “Caring for Country,” and “Animals, Plants and Food.” In addition to revisiting the technological sciences and natural sciences, this conference drew much from the roles that artists and writers play in our cultural understandings of science and of the world in which we are a part. Many excellent papers were presented in an atmosphere of collegiality and warmth, largely in thanks to the conference support team: Nicole Lazaroff and Michele St Anne, from the Sydney Mellon-HfE Australian Pacific Observatory. You can see the program here:  http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/PROGRAM_03032014.pdf

One highlight was Jan Zalasiewicz’s paper, “The Anthropocene as a potential new unit of the Geological Time Scale,” which discussed how disciplines outside arts, humanities, and social sciences can offer vital knowledge, clear, hard facts, and a fresh outlook. Zalasiewicz is from the University of Leicester (UK) and is one of the working party who are reporting on the validity of the term “Anthropocene” for geologists. This paper spelled out the scientific methods and empirical validity required for events to register in this discipline; thus, it became much more clear what is at stake in accepting a new term, a new period. To support his point, Zalasiewicz presented hundreds of examples of the environmental changes that have occurred in our period, the late Holocene–from our use of plastic, minerals, and metals, to the shifting patterns of landscapes and continents, and climates and species movements.

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Last but not least…

Last year, in attempt to find out what is happening in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, I presented at eight conferences in three countries. I hardly had time to think! Highlights included:

  1. The University of Sydney launched its Environment Institute, with a new group ‘Humanities for the Environment’ – this collaborative network is funded by the Mellon Foundation, and is working on a number of projects – its members include the founding President of ASLEC-ANZ and first Professor of Environmental Humanities in Australia (Kate Rigby), and the current President of ASLEC-ANZ. http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/mellon/
  2. One of Australia’s proto-ecocritics, Dr Ruth Blair invited me to speak to her Pastoral reading group at UQ, shortly after the AAH conference that I’ve spoken about above. This team is organizing the ‘Afterlives of Pastoral’ conference, to be held in July, only a few weeks after our biennial: http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/pastoralconference2014. Our time in Queensland was fantastic; a great group of people came together to spend nearly all of Saturday to discuss critical frameworks for Pastoral, from William Empson onwards. I thought the conversation was over; far from it–it appears that Australian literature, and other post-colonial literatures are increasingly interested in what might constitute a counter-pastoral!
  3. I’m fortunate to be one of the small group of scholars at UNE who have been awarded funds from The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Partnership to investigate two issues concerning seeds (and cultural knowledge in a farming context): (1) the colonial and contemporary relations between botany, seed exploration and seed banks; with a particular focus on relations between Kew Gardens (UK) and Sydney and Melbourne herbaria; (2) the tensions between traditional knowledge and indigenous values on one hand, and the pursuit of capital, intellectual property on the other. Some of the investigators will present at our biennial conference “Affective Habitus” this June, and a small number of people will join the conference on day three as part of a “seed colloquium” to see how we can best tackle the issues as presented in the research papers.

To conclude, may I recommend some reading? ASLE members might really enjoy a quick visit to the pages of the journal PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature); a new issue (10) is focused on fungi: http://www.panjournal.net/. Finally, I’ve been thumbing through a new anthology from Yale UP: The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (Edited by Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde). Coming in at 584 pages, it’s quite a text, and extremely useful for teaching material as it places canonical environmental essays alongside twenty-first century commentaries: you get the history of an idea and its contemporary relevance all in one go! I would like to offer my sincere gratitude for all the help and support provided by the ASLEC-ANZ executive over the last few months; and for all the interest from ASLE affiliations across the planet! PS Don’t forget to keep an eye on our biennial conference! http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/affective-habitus.aspx