Deadline: September 15th 2023
Contact: Conference Organizers
Email: seamoreblue.easlce@gmail.com
10th EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment) Symposium
Sea More Blue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics
Perpignan, June 17-20 2024
Keynote Speakers / Conférences plénières
Ben de Bruyn
Sidney Dobrin
François Sarano
Melody Jue
Invited Artist / Artiste invitée
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. For the 10th bi-annual EASLCE symposium to take place by the Mediterranean in the South of France, it seems fitting to invite academics and artists from diverse backgrounds to join the local effort started at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia (UPVD) to launch an extensive interdisciplinary research program called Sea More Blue. Engaging multiple scientific disciplines at once, the Sea More Blue project—with its poetic, grammatically queer formula—sounds a call to depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge to discover and promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life.
In the wake of the blue turn recently occurring in ecocriticism—a turn also affecting the wider, predominantly “green” field of the ecological humanities—various cross-disciplinary projects have emerged which draw attention to the unfathomable depths of marine ecosystems and related burning issues. To see more blue and keep our oceans and seas thriving in the long run, we must seek inspiration in the exuberant creativeness and circulation of matter, beings, and narratives throughout one dynamic body of water, both around the globe and since the beginning of life on our symbiotic planet.
Oceans and seas know no real boundaries. Reaching out in countless ways, oceans and seas connect with land, watersheds, rivers, underground water tables, and even with the sky, the moon, and the sun. Marine water fluctuates following atmospheric, gravitational, and temperature variation phenomena that rule the tides, the currents, the weather, and the cycles tying saltwater with fresh water, thus interweaving humans and other-than-human lifeforms in the great blue-green web of live. Tapping into the blue currents of the earth that run all the way through our own veins, it is high time we minded the permeability and fluidity, the pull and lability likewise intermingling the different categories, research fields, epistemologies, and cultural productions that have been mapped out so far in academia. As the boundaries between them are turning out to be quite porous, especially from the standpoint of the ecological humanities and arts, scholars and scientists of diverse backgrounds have started reconnecting different types of knowledge, thus grappling with a multiplicity of lenses to apprehend the living world.
The UPVD transdisciplinary ecopoetics team known as OIKOS has previously run several events and publications bringing together different takes on natural and cultural issues apprehended through the kaleidoscopic lens of reenchantment. To look specifically into the complex, wonderful, but also awful, ways in which marine matter and forms are animate, agential, and entangled with our human activities, bodies, and discourses, this conference aims to foster the braiding of various approaches to blue ecopoetics, humanities, and sciences. This 10th EASCLE symposium specifically seeks to study those narratives, performances, actions, practices, policies, and artistic productions that can help restore the partly broken bonds between sea and land creatures, ecosystems, and places.
Participants are primarily invited to think and perform with marine creatures, works, elements, and milieux, from far off oceanic areas all the way to the shore. Papers might zoom in on the value of an ecopoiesis anchored in liminal places such as lagoons and coastal areas, which form ecotones and contact zones between water and land. Scholars may also potentially look at rivers and watersheds to reveal how those do flow into a blue ecopoetics that is subtly tied to the sea indeed, and that is already gesturing to a shift in paradigms following from these other types of ecotones. Finally, it could be of interest to look at places that are connected to the sea from a more diachronic perspective, i.e. places which used to be submerged in ancient times, which are thus possibly still marked by an ancient blue history, and thus encouraging a radically different perspective onto deserts, forests, plains, or any other place now perceived as antipodes to marine ecosystems.
A specific focus on cross-species encounters and communication may help counter the alienation from our lives which marvelous marine beings and milieux suffer from—in part because they too often seem unfamiliar and strange, and in part because they are mostly inaccessible to us. Material approaches of humans as evolved from, made of, and dependent on salt water and beings could be confronted with mythical stories of sea worlds that have long shaped our perception, representations, and ways of life as land-dwelling and story-telling mammals. The study of specific subcultures or groups of people sharing sets of stories, practices, and values revolving around the sea could provide a better grip on what might be called blue spiritualities. Speakers are particularly prompted to look at ecopoet(h)ic productions—be they contemporary or older, and from various forms of literature to film, graphic novels, dance, music, drama, sculpture, painting, photography, and video games for instance—that creatively challenge and reinvent our imaginaries and our narratives of becoming with the sea.
In addition, scientists whose fieldworks have induced corporeal and affective involvement with their objects of study are invited to reflect on how such a personal implication may have changed their perception of the “environment” that they are supposed to be investigating objectively. Such scientists are moreover invited to ponder how this might have impacted their research methods and scientific communication style. Simultaneously, papers scrutinizing the accuracy and truth régime of artistic productions in terms articulating ecological, biological, geographical, and ethological understandings will be of specific interest. It will be crucial, amongst other things, to shed light onto the specificities of seascapes as underwater geographies, soundscapes, odorscapes, and feelscapes that generate ways of perceiving, moving, and communicating that are properly outlandish and hence hard for humans to seize. Participants could probe to what extent ecopoetic experiments are designed specifically to speak worlds about underwater ways of dwelling. Conversely, ecocritics are encouraged to look at texts or works of art that craft seriously problematic worldviews in that they are vastly disconnected from the actual processes at work in blue worlds while they simultaneously feed into anthropocentric illusions and thus further lean into disenchantment and into the overexploitation of limited resources.
One of the key questions that we should ask ourselves is thus how immersive experiences through art may augment our capacity to see and feel in bluer ways. Furthermore, scholars working with Traditional Ecological Knowledges can help us understand the subtle ways in which Indigenous storytelling, practices, and rituals may be informed by empirical observation that has long trickled down into ecopoetic productions. Ultimately, the purpose of this symposium is to provide evidence of the great role literature and the arts might play in helping us move away from the earthly paradigms Westerners have been navigating the world with so far. We hope to demonstrate that such a paradigm shift can occur most effectively when the arts and humanities turn out to be permeated with the sciences and vice versa, and most importantly, when Western scholarship is carried out in conversation with Traditional Ecological Knowledges.
Proposals can take the standard form of individual twenty-minute presentations or of pre-formed panels with three to four connected papers. We will also welcome creative approaches and papers adhering to narrative scholarship. Proposals must be sent by September 15th 2023, to seamoreblue.easlce@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance by the scientific committee will be sent out by Nov 15th 2023.
Registration fees will be calculated and posted around the time of acceptance, with special fees for EASLCE members and members of affiliate institutions (ASLE and ASLE branches), for early-bird registration (before Nov 15th 2023), and for students as well as unwaged participants.
Posted on September 6, 2023
