Deadline: Nov 30, 2026
Contact: Amit Rahul Baishya, University of Oklahoma
Email: arbaishya1@ou.edu
Phone: 3195417366

In his searing book on the Gaza genocide, Ungrounding: the Architecture of Genocide, Eyal Weizman expands his central concept of ungrounding in the following manner: “Ungrounding…aims to remove a society from its place and erase all traces to its previous existence. It extends from buildings down to the soil beneath them. It is a type of violence that is earth-shaping, terra-forming. Ungrounding is not a by-product of military confrontation but rather its aim. It destroys all conditions that sustain life and produces an empty slate, a tabula rasa. The monochrome desert of upturned soil is the material signature of Israel’s genocide” (5).

The CFP for ASLE 2027 connects three key terms: terra (earth), terroir (simultaneously the ecological aspects of a place and the violence perpetrated in the name of ownership) and terrere (terror). Weizman’s concept of ungrounding, and the ecological tenor of his critical work in general, connects all three dimensions animating the 2027 conference. While Palestine will be a central focus for this seminar/panel, I would also like to extend Weizman’s conceptualization to other necropolitical locales. More specifically, these are some of the major issues this ASLE seminar would like to address:
1. Ontology: How does soil “ground” being, existence and collectivity? How does “ungrounding”—upturned and devastated soil—create and sustain necropolitical topographies?
2. Epistemology: How do monochrome and monohumanist imaginaries and terrestrial technologies unground collectivities and create crisis and catastrophe? Alternatively, how do situated and relational knowledge systems about soil facilitate “alterbiopolitics” (de la Bellacasa) and alternative systems of existence and collectivity?
3. Ethics: How do alterbiopolitics of care and relationality facilitate imaginaries of otherwise worlds? Furthermore, how are trace-effects of effaced forms of life contended with in literary and cultural works?
4. Politics: If, as Peter Sloterdijk notes about gas warfare in Terror from the Air, modern and late-modern warfare is not aimed only at the enemy but the destruction of the enemy’s environment, how does ungrounding accentuate and amplify this environmental destruction through its “earth-shaping, terra-forming” dimensions? Are there modes and techniques of political resistance that collaborates with the soil, subsoil and undersoil as allies?
5. Anthropocene: What are the effects of acts of ungrounding on the planetary record? How does the slow violence of ungrounding persist over the longue durée? How does it impact multispecies lifeworlds?
Please send 250-300 word abstracts to arbaishya1@ou.edu by Nov. 30.

Posted on October 12, 2026