CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline: 1 MAR 2014)
Sustainable Networks: The Enlightenment to the Contemporary Conference
Nanyang Technological University, Yunnan Garden Campus, Singapore
June 13-15, 2014

In 1987 the Brundtland Commission influentially defined "sustainable development" as "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." "Sustainable Networks: The Enlightenment to the Contemporary" will provide a forum for scholars to theorize sustainability's future-oriented but historical grounding while examining the necessarily interdisciplinary approach to sustaining human society.

"Sustainable Networks" will encourage a broad, interdisciplinary approach to cultivating "systems literacy" (the methodological awareness that sustainability is a complex, nonlinear phenomenon and that a broad-based interdisciplinary pedagogical commitment to intellectual and civic engagement is necessary). Invited speakers include David Fairer (Plenary), Kevin Cope (Keynote), Greg Clingham, Kathryn Duncan, and Sir Malcolm Jack. The conference organizers are planning excursions to Singapore's innovative Gardens by the Bay as well as to the historic Singapore Botanic Gardens.

The organizing committee invites abstracts addressing any aspect of "sustainability." Papers with an interdisciplinary or comparative focus are encouraged. Topics include but are not limited to:

- Sustainability as a concept
- Biopolitics
- Pedagogy and sustainability
- Approaches to "systems literacy"
- The historical development of sustainability
- Humanities leadership in sustainability debates
- Pre-romantic ecology?
- Comparative approaches to world literature
- Global networks and their sustainability
- Approaches to balancing heritage conservation and technological progress
- Sustainability and intersectionality (gender, race, ableism, colonialism)
- Speciesism and cross-species justice
- The rhetoric of sustainability
- Sustainability and adaptation
- Curating, revising, and reviewing sustainability: ideas of successful ecologies and economies over the ages
- Sustaining the museum, maintaining the library: the survival of artifacts over a long future

The official conference website is: http://portal.cohass.ntu.edu.sg/sustainablenetworks/default.asp
Please send abstracts (300 words) by 1 March, 2014 to the conference organizing committee at: sustainablenetworks@ntu.edu.sg. For general questions please contact Dr. Samara Cahill at sacahill@ntu.edu.sg.

"Sustainable Networks" is co-sponsored by: the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), the NTU Humanities and Social Sciences Sustainability Cluster, the NTU Division of English, the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS), and the Southeast Asian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SASECS).