Deadline ending soon! Proposals due March 3rd.

Craft Critique Culture Conference: Emerald-Colored Glasses: An Environmental Vision

Call for Papers

The University of Iowa English Department invites proposals for its 2023 Annual Conference, Craft Critique Culture, to be held in person in Iowa City, IA. 

Event Dates: April 20-22, 2023

CRAFT CRITIQUE CULTURE is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on the intersections of critical and creative approaches to writing both within and beyond the academy.

Our embeddedness within a more-than-human world is one part of what defines us as human. In the 1940s, Iowa-based environmentalist Aldo Leopold offered a land-based ethic: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” We hope to hear papers pursuing questions within and adjacent to the environment, broadly conceived. We are interested in how life is becoming less livable and for whom that is happening most rapidly. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen reminds us, “Ultimately, we all will pay more for food that is of less nutritional value because we are flushing the nation’s greatest soil resource base to the depths of the gulf…We all have a sense of what is going on around here but are just beginning to recognize it for what it is: climate change.” We are interested in the edges of who has been – or is still not recognized as – part of the human community and are inspired by such authors as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, and Robert Bullard. Alongside the embedded histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that partially define the present, such authors highlight the practical and theoretical uses of storytelling, witnessing, information-gathering, and skill-sharing as a means of forging another world. How we imagine our solidarities with the earth, as our shared and imperiled space of commitment, struggle, and repair, is inseparable from how we imagine our relationship to one another.

Our keynote speaker will Joshua King, a University Professor of English at Baylor University. He received his Ph.D. in May 2008 from Harvard University. His primary research interests include nineteenth-century British poetic form, religion, and print culture, as well as ecotheological and environmental perspectives in nineteenth-century literature

This call is for academics from all over, especially graduate students and early-career scholars. What are the narrative and poetic tools that strain to be adequate to our moment? Where, within the longer past, do we find congruent projects and intersections? How can we engage in environmental sustainability and justice? Because we are wary of the capacity of despair and rage to short-circuit our thinking, we are also deeply curious to hear papers on the vital place of joy at a moment of ongoing and exponentially increasing ecological devastation. Or, to rephrase this as a question by way of Hanif Abdurraqib: “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This?

We invite 300-word proposal submissions for the following categories:

• Panel Presentations
• Creative Work
• Roundtable sessions

UPDATE: Proposals are due Friday, March 3rd at 11:59PM to studorg-c3conf@uiowa.edu. Please include your name and affiliation.