Deadline: December 1, 2024
Contact: Michael Boyden, Professor of English, Radboud University Nijmegen
Email: michael.boyden@ru.nl
Phone: +31651687285

This is a panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

Classical theories of law and justice find their origins in our connection to the earth. Yet the rise of international greenhouse gas emissions trading systems since the turn of the century has led scholars and policy makers to develop a politics of modern “geopower” (Bonneuil & Fressoz, Latour, Luisetti) predicated on the appropriation and monetization of air rather than land. Understanding air territorially relies on national jurisdictions for flight routes and international treaties for the increasing number of satellites orbiting the planet. Given environmental and social inequalities across the global north and south, these territorial and national models for regulating the air encourage “air-appropriation,” as Andreas Folkers terms it, which perpetuates existing colonial and neocolonial hierarchies. Where models for air regulation once focused on nationally defined territories, the new geopolitical and planetary situation calls for alternative and innovative approaches to understanding and engaging with atmospherics and ephemeral space. Indigenous studies, new materialist, posthumanist, and feminist scholarship (a.o. Simpson, Tuck, Arvin, Morrill, Alaimo, Haraway) offer diverse frameworks for theorizing the fluid and ephemeral nature of air as it flows in and out of human and more-than-human bodies while traversing the planet in ongoing circulations and interactions with ocean currents.

This panel invites proposals for papers that ask how literature and art navigate and bring into existence these new and sometimes competing regulatory and conceptual constellations of ephemeral environments in the climate crisis. How do artists and writers interrogate and critique various forms of “air-appropriation” in the form of solar engineering, emissions trading, and carbon capture? Do they imagine alternative modes of spatialization and belonging that resist or strategically redeploy market-based mechanisms? How do they narrate or visualize specific conceptualizations of space, atmospheres, and being on both the molecular and global level? What new reading methodologies do ecocritics need to address questions of air sovereignty that recognize atmospheric and transcorporeal interactions across bodily to planetary scales?

This panel is organized by Michael Boyden (michael.boyden@ru.nl), Molly McVeagh (mcveaghm@wfu.edu), and Kate Huber (K.M.Huber@tilburguniversity.edu).

Please send a 200-word abstract and a short bio statement to all three panel organizers by December 1, 2024.

Posted on October 14, 2024