Deadline: December 15, 2024
Contact: Mario Ortiz-Robles, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Email: mortizrobles@wisc.edu
Phone: 608-886-0951

Panel call for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11, 2025 at the University of Maryland.

Fleeting, distant, elusive, and often operating beyond the human sensorium, airborne collectivities (birds, bats, insects, microbes, pollen, seeds, etc.) offer new ways of thinking about collective action and environmental histories in an atmospherically challenged planet. This panel seeks papers on the representation of airborne collectivities as environmental agents. What can swarms, flocks, clouds, murmurations, and other flying phenomena tell us about the current state of our damaged planet? How can they help us sense environmental change? What can they teach us about the future of multispecies entanglements? How can we represent (in film, literature, art, social media, etc) life forms that escape our earth-bound means of representation?

We invite proposals that engage with airborne collectivities in transhistorical, multidisciplinary, and multimedia configurations.

Please submit proposals of 250 words and short bio by December 15 to Ursula Heise (uheise@humnet.ucla.edu) and Mario Ortiz-Robles (mortizrobles@wisc.edu)

Posted on November 25, 2024