October 14, 2024

Discussion symposium at Collective Atmospheres, ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference July 8-11, 2025 University of Maryland, College Park

Co-moderators invited to facilitate a discussion symposium about endeavors by academics, activists, and creatives that entangle, weave together, and co-create communities and coalitions – ephemeral or enduring – to further socioenvironmental justice.

The purpose of the proposed discussion symposium is to attend to and elevate the myriad ways that collective atmospheres are co-created and emergent from relationships, stories, imaginations, and thinking, feeling, being, and acting in diverse contexts.

All ...

Panel CFP for the ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference, July 8-11 in College Park, MD.

Energy studies often invokes an infrastructural imaginary characterized by brute physicality: pipelines, power stations, and extractive megaprojects. The effects of these physical structures on colonized bodies are physical and tangible: the coal dust that coats the bodies of workers, the oil slick that spreads across the body of the planet. For that reason, we likewise imagine the linked work of transition and decolonization as a physical labor of dismantling and ...

Panel proposed for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres University of Maryland, College Park, MD July 8-11, 2025

“The Same Air, Water, and Hope”: Environmental Narratives Through the Razor Wire

In his 1989 essay “A Toxic Shock,” imprisoned activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, “Despite the legal illusions erected by the system to divide and separate life, we the caged share the same air, water, and hope with you, the not-yet-caged. We share your same breath.” How can something as violently boundary-setting as razor wire still allow for the ...

This is a panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

This panel seeks to build a collective atmosphere for island and desert studies, a space where desert(/)islands can share the same critical air. Islands have historically had the lure as paradisal spaces, and this has led to their often complicated and complex colonial histories. Meanwhile, global desert environments have frequently been represented as vast, unpeopled wastelands; such depictions risk perpetuating Indigenous ...

This is a panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

In a 2023 essay for SubStance, Luce Irigaray remarked that it is “subtlety that grants air its universal potential and its ability to act as a mediation, not only between the different parts of us, but also between the different living beings.” This non-guaranteed ASLE 2025 panel of traditional scholarly papers invites proposals for presentations that speak to the capacity of ...

This panel seeks to explore how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists depict natural elements—such as water, air, landscapes, and weather—as active forces that shape and mediate human emotions, identity, and survival. Through an environmental humanities lens, we will examine how these works go beyond symbolic uses of nature to show how ecological crises become part of the migrant experience. In many Latine / Latin American narratives, migration is influenced not only by social and political pressures but also by environmental ...

Panel CFP for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11 2025, University of Maryland, College Park

Water, as a shared and finite resource, both reflects and changes the relations of power that govern its uses, distributions, and representations. As the material consequences of water mismanagement continue to manifest—ranging from deep-sea mining to the severe water insecurity that disproportionately affects communities of colour—contestations over water that occur in “imaginative geographies” (Edward Said) and speculative environments may bring those uneven power relations and their latent racializing logics ...

“Atmospheres of Poiesis /Poetic Atmospheres,” panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

Can thinking through atmospheres bring ecological resonance to our poetry?

As the layer of gases, including oxygen, that surround the planet, atmosphere serves a protective function, enables respiration, and houses the liquidity and wind [motion/disturbance?] that can coalesce as weather. By enabling both breath and perception, the atmosphere is a node of connection between the global and the individual. Since ...

This is a panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

Classical theories of law and justice find their origins in our connection to the earth. Yet the rise of international greenhouse gas emissions trading systems since the turn of the century has led scholars and policy makers to develop a politics of modern “geopower” (Bonneuil & Fressoz, Latour, Luisetti) predicated on the appropriation and monetization of air rather than land. Understanding ...

Panel for the 2025 ASLE Biennial Conference “Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality” July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland College Park

This panel seeks to explore the relationship between the Gothic and the air/atmosphere through an ecocritical and interdisciplinary lens.

Gothic representations of air/ atmosphere are effective sites for reflecting on disturbing forms of transcorporeal encounters indexed by pollution, toxicity, and other porous agents that break down the corporeal and affective boundaries between human and nonhuman entities. From another angle, these aerial and atmospheric hauntings ...