Deadline: Jan. 30, 2022
Contact: Emily Gephart/Maura Coughlin
Email: mcoughli@bryant.edu

CFP: Object Lessons: Ecocritical Case Studies in Visual Culture

Following a session of short form visual culture presentations in the new Ecocritical Visual Culture interest group at ASLE in the summer of 2021, we are soliciting additional contributions to a collection provisionally titled Object Lessons: Ecocritical Case Studies in Visual Culture.

This collection will feature visual image analyses that might stand alone for general readership or be integrated to courses on the Environmental Humanities. Its over-arching agenda addresses the question of how the environmental humanities enhance the study of visuality and how visual culture and art enrich the environmental humanities. The assembled essays should each use an image or object as a point of departure from which scholars demonstrate ecocritical tools in practice. We envision this non-linear text as a visual-studies complement to interdisciplinary readings in the environmental humanities. It will have a global perspective, and model novel research methods. Unlike many texts that focus on contemporary art or the ecologies of a nation or region, the case studies in Object Lessons will span medieval to contemporary art. Thus we especially welcome submissions that adopt cases predating the contemporary, de-center Eurocentric objects and philosophies, and demonstrate how visualization is essential to making ideas thinkable and possible.

Entries (2K-3K words) should be closely observed interpretations that unpack a single image, that clearly cite their methods (in interdisciplinary ecocriticism), and that are written in accessible language.

Essays should be tagged with keywords which might include, but would not limited to:

The Climate Crisis

Extractions & Extinctions

The Capitalocene/ Plantationocene

Inter and Intra-sectionality

Ecomaterialism

Indigeneity

Environmental Justice/ Slow Violence

PostHumanism

The Columbian Exchange

Settler Colonialism

Diaspora/ Migration

Dispossession

Invasive/Native Species

Plant Studies & Food Insecurity

Bioprospecting

Racial and Environmental Equity

Natureculture

Queer Ecologies

Ecofeminism/Hydrofeminism

Worlding & Kinship

Animal Studies/ Zoontologies

Assemblages, Collectives & Actants

Biosemiotics

Natural Histories, Taxonomies and Archives

The Mesh/ Networks

Futurism & Afrofuturism

Cybernetic Ecologies

Commons, Gift Economies

Please send an abstract of 250-350 words, a CV and statement of interest to mcoughli@bryant.edu and emily.gephart@tufts.edu by January 30, 2022.

Posted on November 30, 2021