“This is a watery place, a place of second sight, and the watery flood.” – Patrick Friesen

Muddied Waters is a one-day interdisciplinary colloquium organized by the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) at York University, Toronto, on Friday, May 26th, 2017. 

Muddied Waters is interested in interrogating the intersection of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, two perspectives of critical and increasing importance to contemporary scholarship. York University sits on the traditional territories of the Missisauga of the New Credit First Nations. The name Toronto--or Tkaronto -- meaning “where the trees are standing in water,” or “place where the logs flow,” is “said to come from Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat fishers posting stakes for fishing weirs in the narrows of the river systems, many of which are now mostly paved over with concrete” (Muskrat Magazine). Urban development, the imperatives of late capitalism, and the university itself, have obscured this vital interface of land, water, human, animal, and vegetation, which can be thought of as the intersection between the eco- and the anthro-. As such, we are looking for papers that investigate this eco-anthro nexus, that contemplate contemporary discussions and practices which challenge ecological exploitation, and that speculate on the hybrid, coalitionary, or even parasitical forms that ecological theory and praxis might take in the future. 

Overall, we are looking for papers that exist at that watery place where the anthro and the eco meet. The Anthropocene designates an age in which human hubris has resulted in environmental impact of a scale unseen since cyanobacteria oxygenated the atmosphere; can ecocriticism act as a counterweight to the all-too-dangerous narratives of mastery and subjugation, and overly simplistic divisions between human/nature, human/nonhuman, natural/synthetic, and objects/subjects inherent in our current anthropocentric worldview? A wide range of submissions are welcomed including, but not limited to, academic papers, collaborative projects, and creative works (video art and performance) which play with the theme of muddied waters. Presentations must be between 15-20 minutes long. Papers included in the colloquium will have the opportunity to submit to a special issue of our peer-reviewed journal Pivot, edited by EGSA. 

Possible Topics Include:
- Hydrological and Terralogical Impact and Resistance.- Eco-networks, Assemblages, Human/Non-human alliance.
- Virality, Symbiosis, Parasitism, Eco-sickness/Eco-Risk.
- Technologies of Movement, Migration (human/non-human).
- Species Breakdown, Extinction Events, Context/Ecological Collapse.
- Climate Change, Environmental Refugee Crises, Citizenship, Borderlands.
- Indigenous Environmental Representations and ways of Knowing.
- Decolonization practices in/and the Anthropocene
- Ontological Exchanges, Object Oriented Ontology, New Materialisms
- Fermentation and Preservation
- Feminist Theory and the Anthropocene; Donna Haraway’s Cthulucene 
- Feminist, queer, and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) takes on “contamination” 
- The Abject; the future of the abject
- The limits of interdisciplinarity; contaminating disciplinary lines
- New eco-critical practices; the future of eco-criticism
- Science literatures, science and literature, the literature of science
- Geography and un/remapping (place names, street names, renaming, unnaming)
- Petrocultures, petroconomy, & poetics
- Solarpunk; lunarpunk
- The S(ub)lime!

Please send an abstract of 200-250 words, and a short, 50-word biography to muddiedwaters2017@gmail.com, by February 15th, 2017.

Come muck about in the primordial ooze!