Deadline: 10/15/22
Contact: Jill Gatlin
Email: jill.gatlin@necmusic.edu

Panel sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) at the 54th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 23-26, 2023
University of Buffalo
Niagara Falls, NY

Environmental Justice Pedagogies: Performance and Activism in the Humanities

Performance pedagogy, project-based learning, integrative learning, service learning, and other teaching models all enable students to transform classroom-based arts and humanities learning into performance and action. This roundtable explores these pedagogical approaches in environmental justice (EJ)-themed arts and humanities courses. Participants might consider theoretical and curricular frameworks for approaching:

• EJ project-based or performance pedagogy and NeMLA’s 2023 conference theme of resilience.*
• The humanities as a space for understanding aesthetics, emotions, stories, voices, ideologies, audiences, and community considerations important to EJ performance and activism.
• EJ literature as inspiration for artistic/performance practice at arts schools and conservatories.
• Merging performance or project-based learning, creative experimentation, and activism (e.g., Climate Change Theatre Action, The Climate Music Project)
• Opportunities for EJ humanities projects and performances to address real-world problems, have community impact, and engage the public.
• Environmentally sustainable and equitable performance; the arts, humanities, and arts institutions in a world with ecological limits and unevenly distributed environmental resources and hazards.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns for collaborators and audiences in project-based or performance pedagogy.
• Relationships between project-based or performance pedagogy, students’ ecological anxiety, and students’ socioecological positions of privilege and disadvantage; socioeconomically and emotionally sustainable activism.
• Assessment of EJ performance pedagogy, project-based learning, integrative learning, or service learning in relation to curricular requirements or limitations.

Please submit a 300-500-word abstract on the NeMLA website by 10/15/22, outlining your intentions for (1) a teaching resource you’ll share (e.g., reading list, syllabus, assignment, or activity) and (2) a short pedagogical statement (i.e., analysis of this resource, context, and theoretical approach):

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19886

*”The 2023 NeMLA conference theme is Resilience, an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma, counter ableism, redress social and racial marginalization, environmental destruction, and how we celebrate bodily, cognitive, and neurological difference, access silenced voices, recover from the pandemic, and struggle to save the humanities, and humanity itself from the maw of neoliberalism.”

Contact Jill Gatlin (jill.gatlin (at) necmusic.edu) with any questions.

Posted on October 6, 2022