Deadline: March 25, 2024
Contact: Jane Robbins Mize
Email: jmize@hamilton.edu

Prison Abolition/Environmental Justice: Creative and Critical Approaches

Please find below a CFP for a non-guaranteed session at MLA 2025 sponsored by ASLE: “Prison Abolition/Environmental Justice: Creative and Critical Approaches.”

Call for Papers: MLA 2025 in New Orleans (January 9–12)
Organizers: Dr. Jane Robbins Mize (Hamilton College) and Dr. Isabel Lane (Harvard University)
Supported by: ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment)

The working group “Products of Our Environment,” a collaboration between scholars, artists, and activists inside and outside of prison, invites proposals for academic or creative presentations on the entanglements of prison abolition and environmental justice at MLA 2025.

This panel aims to bring together researchers, teachers, and practitioners who are working at the intersection of prison and the environment. We invite participants to share academic, pedagogical, and/or creative work that engages with the prison as a crucial site for environmental and social justice struggles. We welcome proposals from a variety of fields within literary studies, carceral studies, and the environmental humanities; our hope is to cultivate interdisciplinary dialogue that engenders new opportunities for collaborating and organizing. We are especially interested in approaches that are invested in abolitionist theory and practice; that challenge existing frameworks for education in and about prison; that recognize the limitations of academic work and institutions; that explore avenues for decarceration and decarbonization; and that unfold in meaningful collaboration with incarcerated individuals.

Topics might include:

Prison writing and incarcerated writers

Environmental justice in prison

Abolition ecologies

Carceral geographies (including prisons, jails, detention centers, parole supervision, juvenile detention both in and outside of the U.S.)

Prison labor and environment (fire camps, green job training)

Critical pedagogy

Sustainability initiatives in prison

Histories of environmental justice movements around issues of incarceration (water contamination, extreme heat, evacuation planning)

Food justice (prison gardens, food insecurity)

“Ecoterrorism” and the arrest and incarceration of environmental activists

Documenting and archiving prison writing, art, etc.

Please submit abstracts of 200 words for critical or creative presentations to jmize@hamilton.edu by Monday, March 25th.

—
Jane Robbins Mize, PhD (she/her)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing
Hamilton College

Posted on March 16, 2024