Waste(d) Worlds

deadline for submissions: 
January 29, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
The George Washington University English Graduate Student Association
contact email: 

Waste(d) Worlds
Keynote: Jesi Taylor
March 22nd, 2024

The English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) at The George Washington University invites submissions for our virtual conference

Recent scholarly work from Serenella Iovino on the presence/absence of waste to Stephanie Foote's exploration of garbage to Stacy Alaimo’s thinking on corporeality, colonialism, and the environment, has demonstrated the importance of thinking with the production of waste as an aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical phenomena, whereas Max Liboiron’s (Red River Métis/Michif) Pollution is Colonialism explores what an expansive praxis and framework for thinking through the coloniality of plastic pollution in ways that are attentive to Indigenous, and more specifically Métis, notions of land, ethics, and relations. While Liboiron’s thinking is toward an anti-colonial scientific praxis, such a posture has significant implications for the study of literature and culture amidst the interlocking crises of global warming, imperial militarization, neoliberal capitalism, and the reiterative force of colonial-capitalist modernity. Waste(d) Worlds queries how waste & wastelands, presence & absence, pollution, and discard offer nascent critical methods, frameworks, and ways of understanding the study of literary and cultural production. 

 

What are we to make of pollution and waste as sites where allegory and materiality blur, even more so as they’re taken up within and through a myriad of genres (speculative fiction, science fiction, realist fiction, etc.) and modes (film, photography, novels, poetry, etc.)? If, as Liboiron suggests, colonialism “lurks in assumptions and premises, even when we think we’re doing good” then what do we make of contemporary critical and post critical debates on the role and function of reading in general and literary criticism in particular? What are the ethical imperatives and functions of reading with, for, and through waste and wastelands? 

 

How does the concept of “waste” get us to think differently within and across disciplines including, but not limited to critical race, crip, queer, and feminist studies? 

We invite scholarship that includes, but are not limited to: 

  • The coloniality of waste/ruin

  • Waste & Waste/lands

  • Race & Waste

  • Psychoanalysis and Filth 

  • Disability, Debility, and Embodiment

  • Abjection, Gender, and Sexuality 

  • Alternative world/alter-worlds/discarded worlds

  • Productivity/(Un)Productivity & Potentiality of Waste

  • Economies of waste, extraction, and value

  • Ecocritical perspectives on disaster, preservation, and world-making

  • Indigenous praxis/Indigenous world-making

  • Stewardship, Responsibility, and Relationality

  • Boundaries/Boundedness/Borderlands

  • Attending to absence, loss, disappearance

  • Literary discard, overlooked perspectives, histories, narratives (genres, mediums)

 

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts for fifteen-minute presentations to be shared virtually. All submissions should include the proposed paper title as well as a short bio (100 words). The conference is set to take place in March. Send submissions by Monday January 29, 2024 to gwegsa@gmail.com or through the form linked here: https://forms.gle/GotSVEDf1upsGsU3A