Deadline: December 15, 2024
Contact: Baron Haber and Christopher Walker
Email: cawalker@colby.edu
Panel call for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11, 2025 at the University of Maryland.
Inspired by the conference theme “Collective Atmospheres,” this panel considers how material bodies scry the winds sweeping towards future collectives. The theme invites reflections about atmospheric apprehension: the ways in which the human sensorium enables subjects to perceive otherwise-unseen aspects of our shared material and social environment, what it is and what it could become. In that spirit, this panel seeks papers that consider how bodies–differentiated across multiple axes, such as space, time, race, gender, and species–are not only archives that bare the marks of environmental histories, but also provoke writers, artists, and activists to speculate about emergent forms of collective action and ways of living together. In what ways do differentiated sensory apprehensions of contemporary atmospheres–both material and ideological–afford insight into unseen, unimagined futures?
Topics may address, but are not limited to:
The relationship between individual and collective modes of knowing
- Art, experience, and politics in global/domestic “sacrifice zones” (Steve Lerner) and “trans-corporeality” (Stacy Alaimo)
- SF and the formation of future multispecies collectives, “Terrapolis” (Donna Haraway)
- Echoes of the environmental past across genres and archives, from the eco-gothic to radioactive futures
- Queer environmentalisms and “Eco-crip theory” (e.g. Ray and Sibara)
- Citizen science and alternative modes of sensing environmental change
- Environmental racism, both its ongoing impacts and resistances
- Neocolonialism, development, and indigenous activism
We invite proposals that engage all regions and time periods. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches and encourage scholars from various fields, including religious studies, anthropology, history, and the arts, to submit proposals.
Please submit a proposal of no more than 300 words and a short bio by December 15, 2024 to the google form:
Posted on October 31, 2024
