Calls for Papers

People have been reflecting upon their encounters with marine animals for a long time. Sailors, Native peoples, biologists, whalers, beachgoers, and tourists, among many others, have chronicled a range of encounters across multiple genres and modes of storytelling. Marine animals have been characterized as beasts, monsters, victims, gods, research subjects, commodities, kin, and — as the title of this seminar suggests — aliens, to name but a few. As Stacy Alaimo and other blue humanities scholars have argued, oceans and shores are important ...

In his inaugural book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, the French-Martiniquan philosopher Malcom Ferdinand argues that there is a “double-fracture” between decolonial and environmental thought. Environmental studies seeks to undo the hierarchical structures of anthrocentrism, and decolonial studies to unmake the false valorizations Western political and economic subjectivities. Yet their critical projects are at best adjacent, but are more often foreclosed to one another. Ferdinand proposes that “this double–fracture be positioned as a central problem of the ecological crisis.”

Ferdinand’s provocation remains ...

Building on work from the 2025 ASLE panel Transnational Ecopoetics: Vital Atmospheres in Harsh Climates, as well as an article cluster in progress on Atmospheric Poetics, this panel seeks papers that expand the international terrain shared by ecology, poetics, and critical theory. We seek work that treats theory as poetics, poetry as a theoretical practice, and ecology as a critical frame for both abstract concepts and corporeal landscapes.

Where atmospheric poetics engages the fluid spaces of breath and air, this panel seeks links between ...

Bad Infrastructure Studies

The “infrastructural turn” in the humanities is marked by an earnest critical materialism that has provided a necessary toolkit for analyzing how infrastructures consolidate structures of power through the material of daily life (Berlant 2016). Infrastructure studies scholarship from the last two decades has solidified how academics study and write about “the politics and poetics of infrastructure” as generating “the ambient environment of everyday life” (Larkin 2013). In the face of this now-established discourse, this panel asks: what else can the ...

Responding to the theoretical debate surrounding the Anthropocene, arts and humanities have urged on an update on the perception, conception, and representation – the “aesthetics” – of nature in its non- and inhumanity. In particular, the uncanny has emerged as one productive category for ecocriticism and environmental humanities to think through human-nature entanglements. With its notoriously ambiguous genealogy from Ernst Jentsch (1906) through Sigmund Freud (1919) to its various postmodern de- and reconstruction (Cixous, Bhabha, Vidler), the uncanny draws from the threshold of ...

This seminar seeks to convene 9-12 scholars willing to commit to a three-session discussion of the environmental logics of games and play at ASLE 2027 (June 22-24, University of Maryland, College Park, MD), with a particular focus on the relationship between games/play and territoriality. Building on the broader conference theme of terroir—with its terror-inducing links to settler colonialism and racial capitalism—this seminar invites participants to consider how games reproduce and/or critique concepts of territoriality, extractivism, and resource logic. Recent work in game studies scholarship ...

Call for papers: XIII SWS Vienna ART 2026, “When Science Meets Art”, 2–5 December 2026, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, Austria, with virtual participation available.

The conference invites research across social sciences, arts and humanities. Its official programme connects science, artistic practice and sustainability, alongside the SGEM Vienna GREEN conference. Relevant fields include literature and poetry, language and linguistics, cultural studies, philosophy, history, visual and performing arts, museology and heritage, architecture and design, education, and the social dimensions of sustainability. Researchers may explore how culture, creativity ...

Aquatics as Critical Methods invites us to reflect on and also critically respond to the blue humanities/critical ocean studies/other neologisms, etc. so as to reframe and reconsider the role that bodies of water play as a humanistic method of inquiry and investigation. What might it mean for the aquatic to foster a critical methodology? And what types of methodologies can the aquatic provide/promise/foreclose in the humanities and humanistic social sciences? How might ...

Call For Papers

The Biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies will take place at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people, from May 13-16, 2027.

The conference’s theme, NOVEL GEOGRAPHIES, traces the varied traditions of the novel as a form that has migrated and morphed across different geographical, cultural, and linguistic sites. It is an opportunity to engage with novelistic practices embedded across different locations and in different languages—from the Anglo-American ...