RMMLA-Sponsored ASLE Panel
Guaranteed panel at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This guaranteed panel at the ASLE + AESS conference highlights the work of scholars affiliated with the Rocky Mountain MLA.
Proposals on any topic related to literature and the environment are welcome. Please send an abstract and brief bio to Jenna Gersie by December 21, 2022, at jenna.gersie@colorado.edu.
Priority will be given to current members of RMMLA; please indicate in your email if you are a current member.
Blue Spaces/Blue Bodies: Watery Commons, The Great Connect for All
Deadline extended to December 15
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
“People who visit the coast at least twice weekly tend to experience better general and mental health.” –Dr. Lewis Elliott
“In Minnesota, the fatal drowning rate of American Indians is more than three times the rate for whites. Blacks and Asians in the state are nearly one-and-a-half times as likely to drown as whites, according to CDC statistics. The fatal drowning rate of African-American children ...
Public Environmental Humanities
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
We seek presentations on current projects that utilize the arts and humanities to engage communities around environmental issues. We take inspiration from projects such as the Humanities for the Environment Observatories, the Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois – Chicago, the Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities, and other publicly engaged collaborative projects that address questions of environmental justice, ecological sustainability, and civic education. We wish ...
Energy Justice and the Commons
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This roundtable examines the relations between energy, justice, and the commons as an approach to addressing climate emergency, envisioning alternative energy futures and modes of energy transition, and focusing on the conditions and needs of communities who are disproportionately impacted by environmental harms. While the idea of “energy justice” has been taken up most centrally in governmental frameworks and public policy initiatives, this roundtable considers how, and ...
Between Tragedy and Miracle: Reclaiming the Italian Commons
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
In the Introduction to Italy and the Environmental Humanities, editors Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past describe a peninsula in environmental crisis, a victim of what they call “the strange mechanism that transforms cultural richness into misery, and public good into a private supply for short-term speculations” (2). While that continues to be true in many sectors, there are abundant examples in the country’s arts, literatures, ...
Commons in Colonization
Call for Papers for AESS 2023: Reclaiming the Commons – a joint event with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
This panel will explore how European colonization in the Americas as a whole transmitted Old World forms of commoning on diverse environments (land, water, woodlands, marshlands) to this continent during early modernity and how these commons as places and commoning as practices persisted or became extinct. The period under consideration will be the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The panel will ...
Revolution, Reclamation, and Intersectional Ecofeminism
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
How do we use ecofeminism now, in moments of revolution or reclamation? Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s introduction to Material Feminisms as well as Alaimo’s work in Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space outline some of the tensions between ecofeminist thought and the divergent interests of environmental feminism, material feminism, and feminist science studies in their respective approaches to the natural world, the body, and materiality. ...
Rethinking Timescapes in the Gulf South
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This panel sets out to frame the Gulf South as a space in which the forces of settler colonial plantations and their petrochemical afterlives have made linear time’s inadequacy especially apparent. We are interested in work that takes up the ways writers, artists, and performers in the Gulf South develop methods of resistance to settler colonialism in the Plantationocene by interrupting or disputing linear time. Our hope ...
Contaminated Futures
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Contamination often refers to the risks and dangers of pollution. From oil spills to leaks at nuclear power plants to the release of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, the modern industrial era has created numerous crises of safety for humans and the planet. In this sense, contamination is an urgent issue demanding our attention in the consideration of environmental futures. At the same time, the very idea ...
Forgotten Spaces: Race and Environment in the US South
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
The US South is often a forgotten space within ecocritical discussions, yet it provides fruitful ground for thinking about the commons. In 2019, in the first edited collection of essays on southern studies and the environment, Zackary Vernon notes that ecocritical attention to this bioregion might help “provide a way out of the limitations of thinking too locally or too globally,” in addition to bringing disenfranchised stakeholders ...