Deadline: December 5, 2022
Contact: Sarah Dimick and Sarah Ensor, Assistant Professors, Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: sarahdimick@fas.harvard.edu
Phone: 5074039310

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

“By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended,” the poet Franny Choi writes. “It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place.” Thinking alongside Choi’s depiction of ending and ongoing times, we turn our attention to the art and communities and labor that emerge when the future is called into question. How does futurelessness forge commonalities or rupture solidarities? How do uncertain times alter literary and environmental work? What forms—literary, social, or scientific—become necessary when thinking beyond a common future? Pursuing these and other questions, we will trace the promises and perils of working beyond the realm of futurity, finding meaning within ending and ongoing worlds.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Forms of futurelessness
• Ongoing apocalypse and the art that emerges within it
• Aesthetics of the temporary
• Forestalled or obstructed times
• Predictions and projections and expectations
• Uneven futures produced by colonialism and racial capitalism
• Queer futurities
• Recurrence and cessations
• Scientific approaches to environmental futurity

Please submit a 250-word proposal (creative presentations welcome, along with humanistic and scientific scholarship) by December 5, 2022. Questions and submissions can be sent to Sarah Ensor (sarah.ensor@wisc.edu) and Sarah Dimick (sarahdimick@fas.harvard.edu).

Posted on October 10, 2022