Deadline: May 30, 2023
Contact: Jada Ach, Arizona State University
Email: jada.ach@asu.edu

Western Literature Association Conference

Fort Hall, Idaho, Oct. 11-14, 2023

Abstract Deadline: Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Abstract Length: Up to 250 words

According to Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, founders of an interdisciplinary network of researchers who call themselves The Maintainers, “maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labor that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations.” Narratives that privilege invention and innovation, Russell and Vinsel contend, frequently overlook the lives and efforts of those who “keep our world from falling apart”: the maintainers, caregivers, stewards, allies, and diverse communities of support.

This ASLE-sponsored panel asks us to give attention to—and take seriously—varied expressions of environmental maintenance and repair in literature, film, or other media set in the North American West. Who, or what, maintains or manages lands in the North American West, and what is the nature of those engagements? What is the relationship between maintenance, repair work, and environmental justice? What kinds of ideologies get maintained or reified in narratives that center innovation, and how can we tell better stories about repair? We invite proposals that respond to these or other related questions.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Jada Ach (jada.ach@asu.edu) by Tuesday, May 30. Since the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment is sponsoring this panel, its placement is guaranteed.

Topics might include:

-self-maintenance and rest
-gender and maintenance work
-communities of labor in the American West
-Indigenous-led land management and stewardship
-Indigenous fire science
-justice-oriented repair work
-repairing broken technologies or systems
-representations of conservation or preservation in literature
-maintaining culture
-maintaining and/or repairing infrastructure
-maintaining (urban) deserts
-innovation narratives
-joy of maintenance and repair
-queering maintenance work
-rewilding and repair
-envirotech histories of the American West
-care, repair, and environmental justice
-storytelling as repair work
-maintenance as ritual
-maintaining the status quo
-radical repair work
-maintaining (or undoing) settler-colonial environmentalisms
-roadmaking and repair
-ethics of repair
-geoengineering, terraforming, and repair
-dam and water literatures
-maintaining the archives
-maintaining traditional ecological knowledge

Posted on May 8, 2023