Deadline: 15 December 2022
Contact: Alejandra Decker, University of California, Berkeley & Alejandro Ponce, University of California, Davis
Email: poncedeleon@ucdavis.edu
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Much like tectonic plates, which are shifted by underground convection currents that transfer heat and exert pressure from below, Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics form in fluid exchange with planetary processes and the region’s geological forces. From rock formations to hydrological cycles, aesthetics assemble around often contested geological features, engendering deep social lives that converge, shift, erupt, and leak in many directions. To strategically attend to the slippery aesthetics shaped by, and shaping, processes of geological modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean, this panel proposes an alliance between material ecocriticism and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Specifically, this panel will address the composition of aesthetics around geological forces in Latin America and the Caribbean art, literature, and technoscience. To do so, we will attend to the emergence of modernist geological imaginaries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the relationship between literary modernity and the beginnings of engineering and technical education in the region, the encounters between the technical imagination and humanist discourses, as well as the leakages across genres in literary and technical writings concerned with geological forces, movements, encounters, and bodies.
The following are some of the questions that we would like to explore: In what capacity do technoscience and engineering practices move, push, erupt, or leak into literary and humanistic practices? How does fiction –its genres and rhetorical devices– intervene in the modes of argumentation within technoscientific writing? Could these leakages elucidate possible decolonial undertones within Latin American technoscientific thinking? What methodological tools or analytical approaches in literary and media studies open up –and in what capacity– technical documentation and design projects to new readings?
To be considered for the panel, please submit a brief bio and a 300-word proposal for your presentation by 15 December 2022. Submissions and questions can be directed to the panel organizers at adecker@berkeley.edu and poncedeleon@ucdavis.edu.
Posted on October 6, 2022
