Calls for Papers

Reclaiming the Commons, Rethinking Risk

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

The idea of the commons begins from the belief that capitalism is no longer viable as a socio-economic system and that the contemporary state no longer functions in a manner that meets population needs. The process of thinking and implementing system-wide change beyond late liberal market and state implies an emergent shift in the definition and management of risk that has hitherto subtended forms of governance, social ...

Storied Matter and Speaking Commodities: New Materialisms and Old Marxisms in Discussion

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Since Marx’s Capital, with bolts of fabric and coats, commodity speech was heard. Initially, only the halting speech of use and exchange value was heard, but Duchamp soon recognized involved interrogations, then Wolfgang Haug, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and others heard complex promises and flirtations, in good and bad faith. More recently, such speech has been radically expanded and narrativized into the “storied matter” of ...

Climate, Justice, and the Politics of Emotion

Update: Extension of due date (Oct 28) and online presentation option available, see https://www.learningtolivewithclimatechange.org/cjemo for details!

Climate, Justice, and the Politics of Emotion

A Symposium at University of California, Riverside April 27-28, 2023

NEW CFP Deadline: October 28, 2022 Organized by Drs. Jade Sasser, Blanche Verlie, & Sarah Jaquette Ray

As the impacts of the climate and ecological crises increase, so too are intense experiences of environmental emotions including eco-anxiety, climate grief and climate trauma, as well as less discussed affective experiences such as pleasure, joy, amusement, wonder, optimism, ...

Representations of Labor in Reclaiming the Commons

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

While we must consider real-world examples, histories, and theories that orient efforts toward reclaiming the commons, environmental humanists are uniquely poised to consider how creative texts (including but not limited to novels, short stories, poems, films, theatre, visual art media, and podcasts) represent the imagined labor of reclamation. Though these representations may range from realist to fabulist, from actionable to impossible, EH teachers, writers, scholars, and activists ...

Communicating Catastrophe in the Blue Commons

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

We are seeking proposals for inclusion on the panel “Communicating Catastrophe in the Blue Commons.” In July 2022, the UN Ocean Conference issued the “Lisbon Declaration” entitled “Our ocean, our future, our responsibility” with its authors emphasizing that “restoring harmony with nature through a healthy, productive, sustainable and resilient ocean is critical for our planet, our lives and our future.” This exemplifies another step in a longer ...

Spiritual Practices, Arts, and Communal Resilience in the Anthropocene Asia

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

This panel highlights the role of Asian animist traditions and spiritual practices in the counter-worlding of the Anthropocene. Taking contemporary visual and performing arts as a vantage point of observation, it explores what common grounds are being formed among today’s arts, community resilience, environmental stewardship, and ontological inquiries when artists work with local communities in practicing and politicizing ritual dancing, chanting, rhyming, object-making, trance, healing, and worshiping, ...

IRSCL 2023 Congress: Ecologies of Childhood

https://irscl2023.org/call-for-papers

The concept of the “Anthropocene” brought attention to the profound impact humans have had on our ecosystems, as mediated by cultural concepts of nature, while posthumanism rejects a dichotomy between nature and culture and understands the human as entangled with the environment. An intersectional focus on children’s literature and culture reveals how children are cast as both vulnerable to environmental destruction and as powerful agents of environmental change. As humankind faces environmental challenges of terrifying scale, the 2023 IRSCL Congress theme, “Ecologies of ...

Autobiographical Style and Method: The Ecocritical First Person

Guaranteed panel sponsored by the Thoreau Society 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

What is the role of the personal voice in contemporary ecocritical scholarship? As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, conceptualizing climate change demands an awareness of both personal and planetary scales of transformation, yet traditional academic discourse has tended to discourage the use of personal history, anecdote, and the first-person voice. Our roundtable asks what’s at stake in the personal turn and a more intimate mode of ...

Cultures of Agriculture: ASLE-Sponsored Panel at ALA

This is a call for papers for the ASLE Panel at the American Literature Association Conference: May 25-28, 2023, The Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA (in person).

Papers on any of the following topics in any period of American literature (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction) are especially welcome:

Literature of/and “accidental” farming Literature of/and urban agriculture or community supported agriculture Eco-georgics Agriculture and the wild Literature of/and food (in)security or deserts Lineages of literary farming Agricultural intimacy or indeterminacy Farming and fungal networks Agriculture amid clouds of precarity (drought, flood, fire, climate change, pollution ...

Re-Gaming the Commons: A Talk-and-Play Panel

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

This panel seeks to continue shaping our understanding of the role that games, gaming, or play have in the environmental humanities. Papers specifically tied to the conference theme of “Reclaiming the Commons” will be preferenced over those speaking to the environmental humanities more broadly. All aspects of games and play–not just video or board games–will be considered, but papers should focus their primary attention to one or ...