cfp.english.upenn.edu

Attention will focus on two aspects of the relationship between environmental change and cultural change:

- the cultural, social and historical framing of environmental communication, and in particular of discourses of climate change and loss of biodiversity

- the challenge to contemporary environmental literature and film, and their potential contribution to ecological education and consciousness.

Provisional acceptance has been received from the following invited speakers:

Prof Sidney Dobrin (University of Florida, Dept of English; a specialist in ecocomposition)

Dr Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham, Dept of Geography; a leading researcher in the historical conceptualisation of climate change, social responses and adaptation)

Dr Robert Macfarlane (University of Cambridge, Dept of English; critic and nature writer, author of Mountains of the Mind)

Dr Timo Maran (University of Tartu, Institute of Semiotics; a leading writer on biosemiotics and Estonian nature writing)

Prof Robert Watson (UCLA, Dept of English; author of The Green and the Real in Early Modern Literature)

Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 3000 words/20 minutes OR contributions to paper jam sessions 1200 words/12 minutes) and panels (3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are invited. Topics will include but not be restricted to:

* literary and filmic representations of environmental change in different cultures/ media/ historical periods, and comparisons between them
* myths, lead metaphors and rhetorical tropes in historical conceptualisations of environmental change, and their role in contemporary media communication or political/ popular scientific discourse on the environment
* theoretical approaches, especially posthumanism/ postsubjectivism and biosemiotics
* the aesthetics of cultural responses to climate change: genres (especially varieties of Nature Writing), narrative strategies, images
* environmental citizenship
* environmental activism between modernisation and resistance to modernisation
* cognitive, emotional and cultural drivers of environmental behaviour, and materialist and aesthetic, secular and religious motivations
* the global and the local in theorisations and representations of environmental change
* the contribution of environmental literature, film and art to environmental literacy
* practical demonstrations of ecocritical pedagogy

The lingua franca of the conference will be English, but proposals for panels in other languages are welcome. Accommodation has been reserved on the University of Bath's attractive campus, which is about a mile from the centre of Bath, a World Heritage City with Roman Baths and famous Georgian crescents. A half day excursion is included in the conference schedule, and there will be an optional field trip on the Sunday after the conference. Further details including conference costs will be announced via the confernce website
http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/
in Spring 2010. Funding is being sought for bursaries to support postgraduate/ unwaged attendance.

Submit proposals for papers (title plus 250 words) to Professor Axel Goodbody e-mail: A.H.Goodbody@bath.ac.uk and Dr Greg Garrard e-mail: g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk by 1 February, 2010, indicating your IT requirements (N.B. Please note this extension of the deadline!)