ecocriticism and environmental studies

After the success of the Folk Horror in the Twenty First Century conference hosted by Falmouth University, we are holding another related conference in 2021.

We are aiming to have a face to face conference at the beautiful Falmouth Campus in Cornwall. With sub-tropical gardens and the beach nearby, there will be a ‘Welcome to Dark Falmouth’ cemetery walk above the lovely Swanpool lake, an art exhibition, a gig and street food in place of the more usual staid conference dinner. If we’re going to beat Covid we want to do it in style!*

Remainder from Epistemology: Exploring the Discursive Possibilities of Aporia

Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at the borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught.

– Michel Foucault

This seminar for the 2021 annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association investigates the intersections and divergences among literary, sociocultural, and political-economic species of entitlement and the mechanisms of complicity that perpetuate them. It examines intertwined modes of domination and exploitation including, but not limited to: 

-overtly predatory forms of droit du seigneur; Sadean (and sadistic) forms of aristocratic sexual predation; white supremacist and toxic masculinities; systems of slavery and servitude; and the “pornotropological” rhetorics and practices (identified by Hortense Spillers) that pathologize black and brown bodies; and

South Asian Disasters in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Film, and Culture: 

a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting on April 8-11, 2021.

Co-organized by Liam O'Loughlin (Capital University) and Pallavi Rastogi (Louisiana State University)

Contagions and Non-Human Animals: (Re)Viewing Disregarded Species in Real and Imagined Pandemics

The impact of COVID-19 and the threat that it poses to future human experiences has been well-documented in news reports during the past few months. However, now that non-human animals are possible carriers and becoming infected, their experiences, while often overlooked, are nevertheless integrated into the worldwide pandemic.

Thus, this collection seeks to balance essays about non-human animals during real-world pandemics, such as the COVID-19 one, with those of their experiences during literary or cinematic ones. The scope of this call for papers is broad and can include topics such as:

What: English Student Association Conference

Where: ONLINE (hosted through The Graduate Center, CUNY).

When: 12 March 2021

Abstract deadline: December 1st

Registration deadline: February 12th (*registration will be free)

Please submit all abstracts through the following Google Form: https://forms.gle/srZJ4Wn7YBpaYnHW8

March 18-20, 2021
University of Vienna

What does "materiality" mean for the study of literature, culture, and the environment today? Should we replace “outdated” theoretical models (i.e. Marxist materialism) with newer ones or is it possible to establish a productive dialogue between seemingly disparate generations or paradigms of thought?

Please consider submitting a manuscript for our special issue, Opening the Ecological Text, in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Humanities.  Here is the call for papers and the link where you can submit:

https://acla.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/2/sessiongallery/166 EMERGENCY, My Friends!

Request for Chapters

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication: Local and Global Contexts

Deadline for Proposal Submissions: October 15, 2020.

We invite chapter proposals from both scholars and practitioners of environmental and disaster risk communication for an edited collection which the ATTW Book Series Editor, Tharon Howard, has invited us to submit for consideration for the research line of the ATTW Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication. 

Recently we all must have noticed that there had been numerous memes doing rounds on social media platforms acknowledging, albeit in sarcastic ways, the role of the Covid-19 virus in teaching mankind some of the most-neglected values of life heretofore.  Such cultural texts with their nuanced sub-texts have been rapidly gaining access to our lives and activities as the subsidiary effects of this present pandemic situation. However, the pandemic is not something new to human civilization. There are references galore in various literary and non-literary texts of its sweeping destructive force before. But this present threat from Covid-19 seems to be a kind of a shock to the anthropocentric worldview.

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), Jedediah Purdy describes what he calls the "environmental imagination," which comprises “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives” (6-7). Amidst the gravity of the Anthropocene today, Purdy examines the linkages between environmental imagination and “ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped the world in concrete ways” (7).

Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?