Please welcome our new MLA Liaison for ASLE, Everett Hamner. Everett is Professor of English at Western Illinois University, and is taking over for Clare Echterling, who served ASLE admirably for many years in this role–thanks Clare!

We have issued two CFPs for the 2025 MLA Convention, which will take place January 9-12 in New Orleans, LA:

Panel 1: New Cyborg Manifestos and Natureculture Stories: The Next Forty Years

Guaranteed panel (likely roundtable) sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, with a response from Donna Haraway

In 2025, Donna Haraway’s most famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” will turn forty. Many find “Situated Knowledges” equally significant; indeed we could make a long list of cross-disciplinary interventions from this famed biologist who galvanizes humanists, ecofeminist who embraces technology critically, and ponderer of consciousness who finds muses among dogs. In no certain order, she might also be called inspirer of queer theory, disability rights advocate, welcomer of hybridity, critic of dualism, science fictional thinker, cross-species solution weaver. Whether in essays, books like Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Modest_Witness@Second Millenium, Staying with the Trouble, and When Species Meet, or teaching and public conversations, Haraway’s career has been rich with transformative provocations.

But this guaranteed, nontraditionally formatted panel aims less for retrospective assessment of past accomplishments than for Harawayan attention to our society’s most pressing near-term problems. Whether contributors build directly or more obliquely on her work, we seek brief, pointed, accessible, and visually and verbally exciting arguments. While a roundtable is most likely, other innovative MLA formats are possible, depending on submissions.

In short, how can we imagine naturecultural thinking – whatever new forms it may adopt (fictional, nonfictional, written, visual, analog, digital, scholarly, popular) – addressing urgent, global, often interwoven challenges and opportunities like:

• Exploding genAI usage, including its reliance on human and environmental energies?
• Governmental, military, corporate, NGO, and nonprofit adoptions of AI and other digital technologies, whether for purposes of greater domination or expansions of justice?
• Geoengineering and other large-scale responses to climate destruction?
• Ongoing agribusiness consolidation and homogenization via genetically modified seeds?
• Needs for environmental justice around coastal and inland waterways and flood zones?
• Meat consumption habits, runoff impacts, and related carbon and methane emissions?
• Transitional policies for fossil fuel-dependent workers and local extractionist economies?
• Land use conflicts among indigenous peoples, other minorities, and settler colonialists?
• Expanding uses of CRISPR, mRNA vaccines, and other bioengineering tools for disease response and treatment of various inherited conditions?
• Shifting experiences of and narratives about bodily limitation and possibility?
• New potential for companion species recognition and cross-species communication?
• Surges in toxic masculine and queerphobic rhetoric, from cybercultural to rustic spaces, even as hunger for kinmaking and nontraditional community grows ever more evident?
• Widespread epistemological confusion stemming from digital disinformation campaigns (keeping in mind that this conference will occur only weeks after the 2024 US election)?
• Other topics that simultaneously concern technology and ecology, humans and other species, or other categories that are opposed too easily or absolutely?

All proposals should include:

• A CV;
• A 1-3-word title indicating a near-term problem to be addressed and a 250-300-word abstract that engages up to three main texts, creators, or thinkers (keeping in mind a likely initial presentation of 5-7 minutes); and
• A previous slides-driven presentation featuring tight organization and exemplifying your ability to stimulate a potentially tired, hotel- and conference-center-immersed audience (Powerpoint, Google Slides, Keynote, or PDF-export formats are all fine).

This panel will not be able to address all of the above possible topics, but it will include as many diverse voices as possible while leaving room for Dr. Haraway to respond via Zoom, pending necessary MLA arrangements, and for audience Q&A. Panelists should expect a pre-session coffee or meal invitation, if schedules allow, and ASLE also hopes to arrange an informal gathering welcoming all conference participants.

Please send submission materials in a single email to aslerocksmla@gmail.com by Friday, March 8, and include “2025 Panel 1” in subject line.

Panel 2: Non-guaranteed panel proposals on other topics appropriate for ASLE support

We also welcome panel proposals on any topic that could lead to a second, nonguaranteed, ASLE-supported panel submission. While nonguaranteed panels are most likely to be accepted when supported by two MLA forums or allied organizations in collaboration, ASLE has had other nonguaranteed submissions accepted.

We are open to both preformed panels and those that would require their own CFPs. In both cases, we will consider not only proposals’ insightfulness and timeliness, but also their prioritization of presenter diversity across many categories and their potential to serve a broad set of audiences.

Please send non-guaranteed panel proposals of 250-300 words to aslerocksmla@gmail.com by Friday, February 23, and include “2025 Panel 2” in subject line.