Deadline: February 29
Contact: Kat Caribeaux, Co-Chair and Co-Editor, Northwestern University
Email: ecs-cluster@northwestern.edu
(AT)TENSION: EMBRACING INDETERMINACY THROUGH OBSERVATION, ATTUNEMENT, AND OTHER EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE-MAKING UNDER THE CLIMATE CRISIS
As the Environmental Humanities continues its solidification as a field of study and
specialization, the discipline and its methodologies are at risk of reifying the violences that occur when experimental and emerging methods are codified within pre-existing institutional logics. How can the Environmental Humanities keep its nimbleness, its indeterminacy, its commitment to epistemological justice, in order to resist the pitfalls of standardization? How might scholars,
artists, and practitioners escape their enfolding into an opaque epistemological enclosure and the limitations that follow suit? We suggest that it is precisely through ecological, cultural, and political attunement to forms of stasis and change, climatic and atmospheric flux, as well as epistemic and methodological discontents that we may encounter new modalities of praxis and thought.
For its inaugural symposium, the editorial board of Lime at the Northwestern University Environment, Culture, and Society Cluster welcomes paper proposals from academics and practitioners across the Chicagoland area and greater Midwest that respond to the following questions:
How do flux and state-change engage our attention and how does that attention influence the processes of flux and state-change?
How could attunement to states of transition, tension, and suspension reorient existing modalities of environmental thought and critique?
What forms of attention, reading, or engagement are better attuned to deciphering transitions of material, thought, and practice?
What experiments in affective, attentive modes can prepare us for increased and overlapping forms of indeterminacy?
Successful paper proposals will answer one or more of the questions above, focusing
attention on the stakes of diffusion, dispersion, suspension, materiality, toxicity, expanded or beyond-the-human kinship and sensorial and somatic knowledges. We encourage proposals that lean into these processes as sites of tension and transgression, which also make them sites of active formations and potentialities. In the spirit of the generative atmospheres present in the critical, aesthetic, and political projects of Petra Kuppers, Stacy Alaimo, Yuriko Furuhata, Timothy Choy, Jerry Zee, TJ Demos, Heather Davis, and Christina Sharpe, among others, we welcome paper and presentation proposals from scholars, activists, artists, writers, educators, and all practitioners at various disciplinary intersections.
The symposium will take place in person on May 17, 2024 with speakers from universities, institutions, and initiatives across the Chicagoland area and greater Midwest. Likely organized into three panels, presenters will be grouped according to affinities that emerge in the submission review process. The symposium will culminate with an invited keynote from the Chicagoland area. Presenters will also enjoy a tour of the NU Block Museum’s Actions for the Earth: Art, Care, & Ecology exhibition, the option to attend a companion film series, and the opportunity to contribute to the first issue of Lime. Selected proposals will demonstrate rigor and ingenuity in their chosen topic, engaging deeply and creatively with the stated problem space. Particular preference will be given to those applicants whose research intersects with environmental justice and/or publicly-attuned work.
Please submit proposals through this google form by the extended deadline of February 29, 2024: https://forms.gle/R2oMrzKLVSfM6C3w6
Please include in your proposal a 300-word abstract, a 2-page C.V., and an optional additional work sample. Selections will be announced in early March. Any questions can be sent to Lime and symposium organizers at ecs-cluster@northwestern.edu.
Posted on February 28, 2024
