Submit

To read the entire call for proposals, please click here:

Full Call for Proposals (.pdf)

Click here to see CALLS for pre-formed panels

(please note: click the "SUBMIT" link below to submit proposals to the conference organizers for individual presentations and preformed panels. The "CALLS for preformed panels" link immediately above will take you to the ASLE organization website, where we have set up a forum for people seeking others interested in participating in a possible preformed panel.)

For submission guidelines and information, and to submit a proposal for an individual presentation or panel, please click here:

The submission deadline has passed.

As we have in the past, we will hold a number of pre-conference workshops on central and emerging topics that reflect the diversity of our approaches and our membership. Rather than choose conference leaders in advance, however, we are calling for proposals for workshops and will post what seem the most compelling set of panels before the conference registration opens. Preconference workshop leaders will receive free registration for the 2013 conference and a complementary year's membership in ASLE.

For more information or to submit a proposal to lead a preconference workshop, please email Greta Gaard, ASLE's 2013 Preconference Workshop Coordinator (greta.gaard@uwrf.edu). Proposals should include (a) a 500 word (max) proposal outlining the proposed workshop theme, structure, and your particular qualifications and (b) your vita. Pre-conference workshop proposals must be sent by October 30, 2012.

PLEASE NOTE: The deadline for PRECONFERENCE workshop proposals has now passed. Please do NOT contact Professor Gaard about submitting proposals for the conference itself - those are due by November 15th and should be submitted using the "SUBMIT" link above.

Changing Nature: Migrations, Energies, Limits

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Tenth Biennial Conference
May 28-June 1, 2013.
University of Kansas, Lawrence

SUBMIT PROPOSALS BY NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Click here to see CALLS for pre-formed panels

(please note: click the "SUBMIT" link to submit proposals to the conference oganizers for individual presentations and preformed panels. The "CALLS for preformed panels" link immediately above will take you to the ASLE organization website, where we have set up a forum for people seeking others interested in participating in a possible preformed panel.)

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) invites proposals for its Tenth Biennial Conference, to be held May 28th through June 1st, 2013, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The decennial conference theme is intended to reflect some of the most engaging current conversations within the environmental humanities and across disciplines, and to link those discussions to the transnational nexus of energy, labor, borders, and human and nonhuman environments that are so fundamentally "changing nature," and with it the widely varied kinds of environmental critique we practice, art we make, and politics we advocate. Migrations—of humans, of non-human creatures, of "invasive species," of industrial toxins across aquifers and cellular membranes, of disease across species and nations, of transgenic pollen and GMO fish—have changed the meanings of place, bodies, nations, and have lent new urgency to the old adage that "everything is connected to everything." Energies—fossil, renewable, human, spiritual, aesthetic, organic—radically empower our species for good and for ill, and make our individual and collective choices into the Anthropocene. And those choices are profoundly about Limits on resources, climate, soil, and water; about voluntary and involuntary curbs on individual and collective consumption and waste; about the often porous, and often violently marked borders of empire, class, race, and gender.

We seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and other public presentations that address the intersections between representation, nature, and culture, and that are connected to the conference's deliberately broad and, we hope, provocative theme. As always, we emphatically welcome interdisciplinary approaches; readings of environmentally inflected fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and film; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, practitioners, activists, and colleagues in the social and natural sciences. An incomplete list of possible topics might include, combine, and are certainly not limited to:

Petro-culture and the Energies of Modernity: the Keystone pipeline, hydrofracking, tar sands, global capital and resource wars, other futures
Aesthetics and the Futures of Environmental Representation
Climate Change: mitigation, adaptation, costs, and the concept of place
Empire, Race and Environment: postcolonial ecocriticism
The Futures of Ecofeminism
Indigenous Environmentalisms
"Natural" Histories of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class, Sexualities...
Ecocomposition, environmentalism and rhetoric, sustainable pedagogies/the pedagogies of sustainability
Environmental Justice: toxins, food, climate, sovereignty
Postnatural Nature, Posthuman Humanism
Digital Representation and Natural Experience
Biotechnology: prostheses, genetic modification, synthetic life
Waste: from adopt-a-highway to the pacific garbage patch
Animals, Animality: us and us
Evolution, Epigenetic Change, Politics
Affect and Environmentalism: love, despair, postdespair

Download the entire CFP document (.pdf)