Calls for Papers

EmergencE/Y: ASLE 2021 Virtual Conference Conference Dates: July 26 – August 6, 2021

This panel seeks to discuss the ways in which cultural productions from Latin America articulate and mobilize ideas about nature as a healing source and, conversely, as a source in need of healing. Both Nature as a panacea for an aching body and as an intoxicated environment in need of healing are two common themes expressed in contemporary visual art, literary works, cinematography and other forms of cultural expression from Latin America. ...

The Energy Humanities interest group was founded in 2019 to provide ASLE members a space to shape the future of the emergent field of the Energy Humanities. The interest group will sponsor up to two panels at the 2021 virtual ASLE symposium, to be held asynchronously from July 26 to August 6, 2021. Panels sponsored by the interest group must still apply for acceptance through the traditional ASLE channels, but sponsorship enhances the visibility of the panel at this large conference and will ...

Plants and People, Together in Precarity ASLE 2021 Virtual Conference Panel

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to reshape every aspect of American life, garden suppliers reported shortages as people brought plants into their lives and homes. Online house plant accounts shifted from showcasing collections to documenting slow new growth, while beginning and experienced gardeners alike shared images tagged #gardenupdate on social media during lockdown. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as exemplary of broader patterns in human-plant interaction, this panel explores how precarity, at ...

For decades, the term ecomedia was little more than a convenient catch-all for photographs and films that engage explicitly with environmental issues. In recent years, however, ecomedia has acquired additional meanings: most concretely, it has become a basis for comparing the signifying strategies (verbal, visual, or any combination thereof) that humans use to represent nonhumans; more abstractly, it has become a way of acknowledging the extent to which media (from printed pages to internet servers) can be both human and nonhuman. Drawing on ...

In her 1968 collection Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima issued an all-caps injunction: ‘BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES.’ ‘[M]ake the cars / into flower pots or sculptures or live / in the bigger ones,’ she suggests, ‘why not?’ In the thick of multiple emergencies, the contemporary re-emergence of di Prima’s resonant question – ‘why not?’ – signals the environmental movement’s return to militancy and direct action, epitomized in Andreas Malm’s recent interrogation of this quandary in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Framing ...

Special Session proposal for MLA 2022 Convention

This panel gathers papers that consider how literary urban studies might contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on questions of equity, justice, and the material transformation of cities in the context of climate change, as they are expressed in the literature of any region worldwide or historical period. All cities are in the process of being unevenly and variously transformed by climate change. The World Bank estimates that Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia alone will generate 143 ...

The “Ecocriticisms of Américas” interest group was founded in 2019 to gather and support ASLE members working on the Caribbean and Latin America. “Ecocriticisms of the Américas” will sponsor up to two panels at the 2021 virtual ASLE symposium, to be held asynchronously from July 26- August 6. See https://www.asle.org/stay-informed/asle-news/2021-virtual-conference-cfp/. Panels sponsored by the interest group must still apply for acceptance through the traditional ASLE channels, but sponsorship enhances the visibility of the panel at this large conference. To be considered for sponsorship ...

ASLE Virtual Conference 2021 Panel

Sponsored by the Ecocritical Visual Culture ASLE Interest Group

A lightning-round session in which 6-8 panelists will share ONE image/object and in a short (5-10 minute) presentation, explain how exploring this image/object in the classroom can introduce students to ecocriticism and facilitate its use as an analytical tool. The presentations will be followed by a round-robin discussion and Q & A, in which panelists will talk about their experiences using images as ‘object lessons,’ and/or other innovative ways that visual ...

Deadline extended to March 26, 2021

In the spring of 1796, the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier delivered a lecture in Paris that would shake the foundations of Western science, and ultimately, Western culture: he proved, through anatomical comparison with elephants, that two species—the mammoth and mastodon—had disappeared from the surface of the Earth. Although Cuvier was not the first naturalist to propose that species extinction was theoretically possible, he was the first to definitively prove that extinction had already happened, and his discovery ...

Deadline extended to March 26, 2021

Narrative, like science, empathy, and anger, can be conceived of as a powerful but amoral tool that may be used for a wide range of means and ends. Many educators, with varying degrees of success, use stories to teach or nurture compassion for nonhuman animals. Stories for children, videos for adolescents, books and movies for adults, whatever the media the focus for this panel is on compelling storytelling, framed by educators who are deliberately employing the narrative(s) to ...