[UPDATE] Emergent Critical Environments: Where Next for Ecology and the Humanities? 9 and 10 September 2011

full name / name of organization: 
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE UK) Postgraduate Conference 2011

ASLE UK (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK) www.asle.org.uk ) invites proposals for its Postgraduate Conference to be held from 9 to 10 September 2011 at the Centre for Creative Collaboration (www.creativecollaboration.org.uk, London WC1), on the theme of 'Emergent critical environments': Where next for ecology and the humanities?'
Keynote speakers include:
Kate Soper
Robert McKay
We are looking for proposals from postgraduate students for papers, panels and roundtables which examine the relationship between the humanities, environmentalism and ecology in new and diverse ways. The conference will focus on the dynamic interrelation between ethics, aesthetics and socio-politics that is central to any critical or artistic configuration of local and global environments. We also welcome proposals for presentations and readings from creative writers, artists and activists.
The aim of the conference is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue between different approaches to the study of environments as both intellectual and physical spaces with animal, mineral, vegetable and academic inhabitants. We are especially interested in emergent critical approaches that are shaping the direction of the response to contemporary and historical ecological issues. This includes areas of thought not conventionally associated with what has come to be known as ecocriticism. We are happy to receive proposals exploring ecology, environmentalism or related topics from postgraduates working in literature and ecocriticism, cultural geography, media and cultural studies, film, environmental philosophy, animal studies, sociology or any other related disciplines.

The non-exhaustive list of possible paper topics includes:
The critical environment: art in the face of environmental crisis
The limits of ecocriticism: science in the humanities
Rus in Urbe: urban ecologies
Pastoral and its afterlives
The politicisation of nature: landscape, ecology and resources
(Post)Humans and other animals.
Evolution, extinction and apocalypse
Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism
Nature and nationalism
Chaos: Systems theory, complexity and imagining the environment
Environmental ethics and environmental justice
Waste, pollution and sustainability
Globalisation, place and space
Biotechnology, hybridity and monsters
Ecological histories and historical ecologies
Biosemiotics and zoosemiotics
Ecologies without nature?
Fact, fiction and myth

Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please send a 250 word abstract and a brief biography ( maximum 150 words) to Sam Solnick, Deborah Lilley and Kate Parry – emergentenvironments@gmail.com by 31 March 2011. Proposals for panels (3 speakers) and roundtables are also welcome: please send a 200 word summary of the rationale for the panel or roundtable, in addition to individual abstracts. Please send further enquiries to the above email address.