Call for Proposals
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