Ecologies of Resistance:  Spaces and Embodiments in Medieval Texts

MLA - New Orleans, LA (Jan. 9-12, 2025)

In a time of increasing awareness of the complex interface between beings and ecosystems, and in a time of increasingly radical climate change, how can we learn from the medieval?  Could there be parallels between the environments that gave rise to the radical inequalities of the present and those of the medieval: can we see them in medieval texts, and how could the struggles articulated there inform our thinking today about where we are today?  We ask: how do medieval texts and objects explore and attest to the power of emplaced identities?  What forms can such identities take, and what subjectivities and structures do they produce – not only as singular identities, but as assemblages and networks of linked things? Thinking with ecocriticism, posthumanism, assembly theory, and more, we imagine the work of this panel to explore how medieval texts relied on and thematized ecologies of power and also explored how they could be disrupted, threatened, and dismantled.    

Building off a sister panel focusing on Mattering and Relevance, the Medieval French LLC is pleased to invite papers that attend to the intersection of ecologies, resistance, space, and embodiment. 

Please submit abstracts of ~250 words by March 15 to Megan Moore, mooremegan@missouri.edu. 

It is preferred but not required that interventions engage with French or Occitan material.