science and culture

In The Temple (1633), George Herbert observes that “broken bones may joy,/ And tune together in a well-set song.” Here, Herbert observes the interplay between ailments that affect both the spiritual and physical senses. Senses - understood to be those faculties that acquire knowledge vis-à-vis experience - serve as a shared vocabulary informing both spiritual (i.e., transcendent, religious) and physical (i.e., materialistic, naturalistic) means of treatment. But even in our own day, such connections among theories of sense, spiritual and physical illnesses, and their treatments reconfigure what we mean by “healing” in medical discourses. 

This special issue of Science Fiction Studies examines food’s multiple registrations across the spectrum of historical and contemporary SF. As a core element of both the problems with and solutions to the climate crisis, the global food system is the nexus of an array of future-oriented concerns emerging around issues such as security, diet, foodways, technologies, population, habitats, consumer cultures, production techniques, energy regimes and much more. As a result of this focus the very concept of eating and food as baseline cultural material has arguably been placed under the sign of the future to a greater extent than hitherto experienced.

Jennifer Ackerman’s national bestseller The Genius of Birds (2016) highlights how birds and humans, while on seemingly different evolutionary paths, have coincided in interesting ways as both have risen to meet the challenges of nature (The Genius of Birds 12). Birds have consistently been alluded to in literature, dating back to the Greeks, and the proposed edited collection Avian Aesthetics seeks to deepen the awareness of the importance of birds in the literary and popular imagination while simultaneously focusing on how the human vision of birds has altered in an age of Animal Studies, species-ism, and climate change.

CfP: Wet feet? Flooding, resilience and the climate crisis (online conference)

Keynote speakers to be announced

Funded by the Sheffield Water Centre, The University of Sheffield

19 May 2021

Deadline for proposals: 15 January, 2020

Bullshit Art
Volume 63 (4/2021)
Submission deadline: June 30, 2021
Editors:Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Gulf University for Science & Technology, Kuwait)
Adrian Mróz (The Jagiellonian University in Krakow, PL)

Bullshit Studies is a developing scholarly discipline that emerged in the late 20th century. Prominent contemporary researchers include Harry G. Frankfurt, David Graeber, Eva M. Dadlez, André Spicer, Eldar Sarajlic, Jörg Meibauer, Craig Dalton, Martin Harry Turpin, Vladimir Alexeev, and many others. We are witnessing a rise of interest in earlier concepts such as fakery, inauthenticity, Deepities (as defined by Daniel Dennett), fake news, and post-truth.

The International Conference on Art, Museums and Digital Cultures will bring together different scientific and creative perspectives on the crossovers between information technologies and the arts. How are museums, curators and the artists themselves responding to the opportunities, but also the risks, of the so-called “digital transformation”?
Recognising the complexity and plurality of digital cultures, the conference will discuss recent or ongoing research works in different geographies and cultural contexts.
We invite scholars, independent researchers, digital media specialists, curators and artists to submit proposals for a 15-minute in-person or online presentation, focusing on one or more of the following topics: 

             Language, Culture, Environment is Central Asia’s first internationally peer-reviewed, English-language humanities journal, published four times per year by KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Our aim is to encourage a diverse range of international collaborative work that contributes to our knowledge and understanding of communication and cultural practices and offers new perspectives on the challenges confronting a new age of environmental change.

The ISSN for this open-access, online journal is 2709-5010.

The Climate of Fatigue: What Comes After Exhaustion?

ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) Virtual Conference, April 8-11, 2021

Co-organizers: Sarah Ensor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Steven Swarbrick, Baruch College (CUNY)

Abstracts due by Oct 31.

Colonial Knowledges Online Seminar Series 
Every other Wednesday 5pm, starting 13th January 2021
https://colknowledges.wordpress.com/

Call for Papers:

Colonial Knowledges: Environment and Logistics in the Creation of Knowledge in British Colonies from 1750 to 1950.

Call For Papers: An Interdisciplinary Virtual Symposium on Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Gothic Culture and Research to be held Friday 12 February 2021, 0930 – 1930 (AEST)

Deadline for abstracts: 5pm, Friday 2 October 2020

Returning to the Gothic Ocean is a one day interdisciplinary virtual symposium dedicated to

an exploration of the haunted waters stretching across Australia to the Pacific, Southern and

Indian Oceans as well as the Timor, Tasman, Arafura and Coral Seas. Australian Gothic

fictions are steeped in terrestrial lore of the land and landscape and the architectural forms

built upon it. It descends from the “weird melancholy” of the bush in colonial literature

The representational challenges of climate change, unending environmental disaster, and the Anthropocene have spurred lively debates about realism, its uses or limits, and its antinomies. This seminar seeks to create an opportunity for a comparative aesthetics of realism, and to think deeply about realism and its antinomies in relation to climate change.

      In recent decades, critical theory and scholarship have taken up the category of matter and the material in order to renew interrogations of categories such as the “self” and the “human.” But whereas mid-twentieth century scholarship’s Marxist-historicist turn focused on material circumstances of reading and its social and political effects, these more recent theoretical endeavors – loosely aggregated under the framework of “new materialism” – explore and expand the notion of matter itself: what, after all, is matter, and how does it affect society and its discursive practices? How does it have agency or force, and how does it relate to life, broadly understood?

Call for proposals

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson

Coronavirus disease with its global and local pandemic has been on the top agenda of Government leaders, scientists, health professionals, as well as on the daily headlines across journalistic media. New governmental measures, decrees, scientific recommendations, and sanitary campaigns  emerge everyday to combat or alleviate the pandemic which are endorsed and spread through mainstream media. On one hand, a new discourse and rhetoric has been articulated to create, support, and even impose a ‘new normal’ that reconfigures how human beings communicate, interact, and socialize in public and private spaces.